Robert Raben is a lobbyist, sure, but he’s simultaneously an important power broker in the Democratic Party.
Raben spent seven years as counsel to powerful Democratic lawmaker Barney Frank.
While Barney Frank was the top Democrat on the Financial Services Committee and crafting the Dodd-Frank financial regulation, his longtime chief counsel Raben lobbied on the issue for clients like General Electric. Around the same time, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi arranged for Raben’s firm to “adopt” some of her members, according to contemporaneous news reports.
You may think it’s extraordinary for a party to sanction lobbyists’ “adoption” of individual lawmakers. It is. The Raben Group is extraordinarily entangled with the Democratic Party.
The revolving door connects Raben’s lobbying firm directly to the highest levels of Democratic power. The Revolving Door database run by the Center for Responsive Politics finds 27 revolvers have spent time at Raben. Melody Barnes, a former lobbyist at Raben, became Obama’s top domestic policy aide. Pelosi, Harry Reid, Obama, the DNC — they all trade staff with the Raben Group lobbying firm.
That’s one reason this story from the Wall Street Journal’s Joe Light is so interesting.
The background: a handful of hedge funds invested in failed and bailed out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac a few years back when the companies were under federal conservatorship. (You may recall that Barney Frank was one of Fannie’s fiercest defenders, angrily denouncing anyone who suggested “safety and soundness” issues with the companies that were pumping up the housing bubble.) The hedge funds were betting on the penny stock rising if the federal government spent a few years absorbing the company’s losses, then shored them up and sent them back out in the market — with an implicit government guarantee of course.
The Obama administration, however, tweaked the bailout in 2012 so that these companies (again, obviously operating with a government guarantee) would return any profits to the same Treasury that had saved them and still backtops them. These hedge funds have been fighting in court and in Congress because they want to take Fannie’s and Freddie’s profits. A lot of that fight involves convincing conservative groups that this is a property rights fight. Some of it involves recruiting Democratic and liberal groups.
So here’s the WSJ’s Joe Light:
Last year, The Raben Group, a Washington lobbying firm, offered a minority trade association $25,000 contingent on the association signing its name to an editorial arguing that Fannie and Freddie should be recapitalized and returned to private hands, said Gary Acosta, chief executive of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals.
“They said, ‘If you won’t say exactly what you need to say, we’re not going to sponsor you,'” Mr. Acosta said. He said the association declined the offer.
A DC consulting firm called DCI, and other liberal groups are caught up in this game whereby the hedge funds seem to stealthily lobby through non-profits. Read Light’s piece.
Again, there’s plenty of this going on on the Right, too. A consistent theme: the operatives and groups that take the money of Fannie investors and sing their song fail to disclose this confluence of interests.
One of the oddest things the Fannie and Freddie investors do, by the way, is attack my brother John (a lawyer who writes for the Wall Street Journal) when he points out the legal weaknesses in the hedge funds’ lawsuits against the Treasury Department.
More to come….
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
