keating five

According to McClatchy, six years after the Keating Five scandal, Sen. John McCain pressured U.S. Forest Service employees to approve a potentially lucrative land swap that would have benefited some big donors — including a former associate of Charles Keating Jr.

Even after McCain broke off his relationship with Charles Keating, his wife maintained a partnership with the disgraced financier in a real-estate development that netted her tax benefits and a profit.

The McCain campaign today brought out the big guns to “set the record straight” about Sen. John McCain’s ties to Charles Keating, a central figure in the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
On a McCain campaign-organized conference call with reporters, high-powered Washington lawyer and political fixer John Dowd defended McCain [...]

Sen. Obama’s latest campaign video, “Keating Economics: John McCain and the Making of a Financial Crisis,” features William Black, the former deputy director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, who attended a meeting, in April 1987, of McCain, four other senators and Black’s boss at the time, Edwin Gray.
The “Keating Five” scandal became the [...]

We’ll do it live, as they say.
The Obama campaign is aggressively pushing its new video attacking Sen. John McCain on the Keating Five. Campaign spokesman Bill Burton blasted reporters with a terse, dramatic note this afternoon: “Keating-McCain documentary is now live.”

When the McCain campaign announced this weekend that it would start attacking Sen. Barack Obama via guilt by association, peddling smears about people he barely knows, I thought the tack would lead to the Keating Five.  But I didn’t know it would happen this quickly.

The GOP presidential nominee’s role in the Keating Five scandal raises questions about his fitness to handle Wall Street’s meltdown.

More from the McCain campaign conference call featuring senior adviser Steve Schmidt and campaign manager Rick Davis:
After disparaging The New York Times and the rest of the media, the campaign officials did get around to the stated purpose of the call — discussing the new ad linking Sen. Barack Obama to key figures within the [...]

Here’s something that slipped under the radar yesterday.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan organization that tracks money in elections, employees of a law firm founded by Charles Keating Jr. have bundled more than $50,000 in contributions to Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign.