AIG pressured to donate to Dodd

Jennifer Haberkorn and Jerry Seper of The Washington Times write this morning that after the 2006, AIG execs were influenced by their chiefs to donate heavily to Senator Chris Dodd;

The message in the Nov. 17, 2006, e-mail from Joseph Cassano, AIG Financial Products chief executive, was unmistakable: Mr. Dodd was “next in line” to be chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, which oversees the insurance industry, and he would “have the opportunity to set the committee’s agenda on issues critical to the financial services industry.

“Given his seniority in the Senate, he will also play a key role in the Democratic Majority’s leadership,” Mr. Cassano wrote in the message, obtained by The Washington Times.

Mr. Dodd’s campaign quickly hit pay dirt, collecting more than $160,000 from employees and their spouses at the AIG Financial Products division (AIG-FP) in Wilton, Conn., in the days before he took over as the committee chairman in January 2007. Months later, the senator transferred the donations to jump-start his 2008 presidential bid, which later failed.

Now, if the same type of message had been found among the emails of Enron in regards to a Republican candidate, can you imagine the outcry? So why, exactly, aren’t Democrats calling for Dodd to resign, or at least step down from his influential position among the decision makers in Congress involved in AIG at this point?

If the reason that the media chases down Republicans for sex scandals is because of a supposed hypocrisy between their message and their personal behavior, why isn’t the media attacking the Democrats for their blatant hypocrisy in regards to dealing with lobbyists and donors (not to mention not paying their taxes)?

Speaking of hypocrisy (as we often do here) if this had been the Bush girls, it would have been splashed across front page as a conclusion, not as “purports”.

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Economy, Liberals suck