The New York Times has posted more documentation on then New York Fed Chair, now U.S. Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner's cover up on the AIG 100% CDS payout, otherwise known as the real screw job.
Documents obtained by The New York Times on Sunday disclose correspondence between the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, A.I.G. and the Securities and Exchange Commission over how to keep elements of the bailout from being publicly disclosed. Among them is a request by the New York Fed to the S.E.C. that essentially would have locked up most of the documents pending a confidentiality review.
There is a hearing before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday. Geithner, Hank Paulson and SIGTARP's Neil Barofsky are scheduled to testify.
Click the New York Times link to read the documents in their entirety.
Pretty astounding. Attorneys were acting like AIG was a matter of national security.
Reuters summarizes the emails:
The emails from early last year reveal that officials at the New York Fed were only comfortable with AIG submitting a critical bailout-related document to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission after getting assurances from the regulatory agency that "special security procedures" would be used to handle the document.
The SEC, according to an email sent by a New York Fed lawyer on January 13, 2009, agreed to limit the number of SEC employees who would review the document to just two and keep the document locked in a safe while the SEC considered AIG's confidentiality request.
The SEC had also agreed that if it determined the document should not be made public, it would be stored "in a special area where national security related files are kept," the lawyer wrote.
In another email, a New York Fed official said the SEC suggested in late December 2008, that AIG file the document under seal and then apply to the regulatory agency for so-called confidential treatment, if central bankers wanted to stop the information from becoming public.
This hearing obviously should now include the SEC for now we know even one of the regulators was in the game of not disclosing the biggest ripoff of the bail out.
In fact they are trying to label the AIG 100% payouts, a backdoor bailout, as a matter of national security, thus they could also reject FOIA requests.
Bush/Cox, Obama/Shapiro - What's the difference?
Here I thought that once Christopher Cox was no longer leading the SEC we could get part of our government back. But Mary Shapiro and the Democratic elite are just as beholden to Wall Street as Republicans like Bush and Cox. What are the American people to do when both parties are ruled by Wall Street?
This combining of corporate and government power against the will of the people is not democracy - it is fascism.