Henry Payne reports from NRO's "Planet Gore" --Tony Soprano, meet Barack Obama.
The Obama administration’s War on Capital — as National Review’s editors have aptly named it — claimed its first victim last week, as the lawyer for the investment firm Perella Weinberg Partners says it was threatened by the White House into accepting a deal for a measly 29 cents on their investment dollar.
“One of my clients was directly threatened by the White House and in essence compelled to withdraw its opposition to the deal under threat that the full force of the White House press corps would destroy its reputation if it continued to fight,” lawyer Tom Lauria told Detroit radio host Frank Beckmann Friday. Lauria later said the brass knuckles belonged to White House Auto Task Force leader Steve Rattner.
In short, take da deal or we break yer legs.
Lauria’s account t raises more than a few troubling questions. The White House naturally denied the threat, but the extraordinary intervention of the President of the United States in bankruptcy negotiations is intimidation enough. Obama unloaded on these creditors last week, accusing them of being “speculators” out to destroy an American industrial icon. Those bullying words come from a man who has the power of the IRS and the SEC at his disposal, not to mention the bully pulpit.
We’d hate to see anybody break anything in your office.
But Lauria’s account should also shame the Washington press corps which by Lauria’s account is nothing but a trained Democratic Rottweiler (“the full force of the White House press corps”) that the administration can set loose on its enemies any time it feels the urge.
The Chrysler episode is a disturbing sign of how far this president is willing the bend the law — and the truth — to satiate the demands of a major Democratic special interest, the UAW, which makes out like a bandit in the Chrysler deal, winning 55 percent of the company (the expected investment return, apparently, of committing $25 million to Democratic candidates over the last 20 years).
When asked by Beckmann to counter Obama’s claim that the bondholders refused to make “sacrifices and worked constructively,” Lauria responded that “contrary to what the president said in his news conference,” the bondholders agreed to take a haircut of 50 cents of their investment dollar.
In other words, the president lied.
