Obama's chief of staff has White House experience
— -- WASHINGTON — In selecting Rep. Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff, President-elect Barack Obama turned to someone who has made a quick fortune as an investment banker, earned a six-figure fee to sit on the board of a troubled government-sponsored mortgage company, and became a top recipient of Wall Street campaign cash in Congress, public records show.
"This is an ironic choice for a president-elect who has promised to change Washington," House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio said in a statement.
Emanuel's office said he was unavailable for comment. His spokesman, Nick Papas, said in an e-mail that the Illinois congressman "has consistently stood with taxpayers and investors and against Wall Street." An example, he said, was Emanuel's sponsorship of a law preventing hedge-fund managers from avoiding taxes by using offshore companies.
After resigning as a senior adviser to then-president Bill Clinton in 1998, Emanuel joined Wasserstein Perella Group, an investment firm run by Clinton fundraiser Bruce Wasserstein. With no finance background, Emanuel was paid $16.2 million over 2 ½ years, according to his financial disclosure statements, for helping the firm win business from Clinton donors.
"I brought in business and worked on business that was very successful," Emanuel told the Chicago Tribune in 2003. "I didn't work on one deal. I didn't work on two deals. I think it was close to six or seven, of which a couple of them were over a billion dollars."
In 2000 and 2001, Emanuel served on the board of Freddie Mac, the mortgage company that was taken over by the government earlier this year after its collapsing investments rendered it insolvent. He was paid $292,774 in director's fees and realized a gain of $27,280 from stock options, according to his 2002 congressional disclosure statements.
Emanuel, 48, loaned himself $450,000 to help finance his 2002 congressional campaign.
In a statement announcing the pick, Obama noted that "Rahm spent several years in the private sector, where he worked on large and complicated financial transactions," an experience that has given him "deep insights into the challenging economic issues" facing the country.
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