Initial Pelosi Offering: Visa Just Happened To Offer Her A White-Hot IPO While It Was Energetically Lobbying Her To Stall on Swipe Fees Limits

Granny Rictus McBotoxImplants sure has swell friends.

Now Newsweek and The Daily Beast report that this stock purchase was made as Visa was engaged in a full-court press to lobby Pelosi to stop legislation to curb credit-card swipe fees to vendors.

In 2007, Visa used an army of lobbyists to try to influence Pelosi, including one of her former advisers, Dean Aguillen, Newsweek reports. Aguillen left Pelosi's office to work for the lobbying firm Ogilvy. By law, he could not lobby Pelosi's office directly, but he did lobby Congress on the credit card issue and offered advice to other lobbyists on that particular mission.

In addition to exploiting the revolving door between Congress and lobbying firms, Visa's political action committee made a $1,000 donation to Pelosi's re-election campaign, Newsweek reports (Visa headquarters is in Pelosi's home district). Two days after that donation was made, Pelosi met with Visa executives in her office. Aguillen also contributed $1,000 to Pelosi and another $1,000 to the campaign arm of the House Democratic caucusin the first half of 2008.

Don't worry about her husband Paul's investments, though.

Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Pelosi, said her husband Paul Pelosi's finances are kept distinctly separate from the congresswoman's legislative work, Newsweek reports.

Oh well no problem them. See, I didn't know that a married couple, whose money is, according to California marriage law, equally divisible between them, was keeping their finances "distinctly separate." Carry on carrying on.

No but seriously, why were the Pelosis offered this IPO? Again, as Mike Flynn keeps noting, IPOs are offered to big brokerage houses (in order, I think, to mostly resell them to the public, or, as Nancy and Paul Pelosi call them, "the trogs").

Imagine you're a huge company like Visa. You work with the big brokerage houses to place your stocks and make them available to the general public.

Why on earth would you think, "Oh right, in addition to Goldman Sachs, we probably want to make sure Nancy and Paul Pelosi get part of this initial public offering, too."

You see the problem?

Why would it occur to Visa at all to do this? Why would those names enter into its thinking?

Nevermind the other eight lucrative IPOs major corporations just happened to offer Nancy and Paul Pelosi the same sweet insider deal. (I shouldn't have linked them together like that, implying some kind of connection, because, you know, their finances are kept "distinctly separate.")

Related: Dave Weigel did a brief story about the 60 Minutes piece, Schweizer's book, and the "Breitbart Embassy" in DC.

He doesn't call it the Breitbart Embassy. That's what Breitbart and the other Bigs people call it. They want to get uniforms with epaulettes and stuff.

posted by Ace at 04:21 PM

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