Senator Chris Dodd (D-AIG)

When he wasn't too buy accepting mortgages from his good friend Angelo at Countrywide, Chris Dodd was raking in the cash from AIG. And not the 'good' part of AIG. No, Chris was pals with the folks at the Financial Products unit. You remember them, they are the ones who almost melted down the economy.

As Democrats prepared to take control of Congress after the 2006 elections, a top boss at the insurance giant American International Group Inc. told colleagues that Sen. Christopher J. Dodd was seeking re-election donations and he implored company executives and their spouses to give.

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.

Campaign contribution...retention bonus. It's kind of hard to tell the difference these days. Didn't there used to be a term the media threw around about stuff like this? Culture of something. Corruption! Yeah, a 'culture of corruption'. Whatever happened to that term? You don't hear it much these days.

Last week Larry Kudlow squashed the rumors he was interested in running against Dodd. Can the Republicans in Connecticut come up with someone to run against this corrupt piece of shit?

posted by DrewM. at 11:44 AM

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