Maxine Waters Under Investigation

A senior member of the congressional committee handling the financial crisis is being investigated for steering federal bailout funds to a questionable bank because she and her board member husband had deep financial ties to it.

Months after the media exposed the shady deal involving prominent California Democrat Maxine Waters, the House Ethics Committee is finally investigating the veteran lawmaker’s controversial intervention on behalf of her husband’s failing Massachusetts bank. As a result, the financial institution (OneUnited) received $12 million in federal bailout funds.

Waters pressured Treasury officials to bail out the minority-owned bank whose executives have donated heavily to her political campaigns. At the time she and her husband, Sidney Williams, held big financial stakes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in OneUnited and her husband had just been the bank’s director and still served on its board.

The conflict was so blatant that even the scandal-plagued chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, her good buddy Barney Frank, urged Waters to “stay out of it,” assuring her that he would see to it that her precious bank got bailout money.

More at: http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2009/sep/maxine-waters-und...