When Bernie Sanders brought up Hillary Clinton’s prodigious fundraising from Wall Street at the Nov. 14 Democratic presidential debate, Clinton called it an attack on her “integrity.” And in an interview this week, she said that “anybody who thinks they can influence me on that ground doesn’t know me very well.”
But the fact remains that the Clinton campaign is fundraising heavily from Wall Street. Contributions from the securities and investment industries comprise her fourth-largest pile of campaign money, totaling $2,044,471. Commercial banks have given $443,519 directly to her campaign.
One major donor to her Super PAC, Priorities USA, is Donald Mullen Jr., a man who was singularly able to profit from the financial crisis both before and after the crash of the housing bubble.
Mullen, while a Goldman Sachs employee, pioneered the trades that allowed the mega-bank to profit from the collapse of the housing market. Mullen’s team utilized financial instruments called collateralized debt obligations to essentially bet against subprime mortgages.
A 2010 Senate investigation brought to light emails between Mullen and his Goldman colleagues. As his colleagues began to see the decline of the market, Mullen wrote cheerfully, “Sounds like we will make some serious money.”
In 2012, Mullen left Goldman Sachs to do the opposite of what he did in 2007: He started a hedge fund, the purpose of which was to buy up foreclosed homes and rent them out. New York magazine’s Kevin Roose described the career change this way: “A guy whose most famous trade was a successful bet on the full-scale implosion of the housing market is now swooping in to pick up the pieces on the other end.”
Mullen gave $100,000 to Priorities USA Action on June 30. According to Federal Election Commission data, this is the largest single contribution he has made to any soft money organization in his giving history. (In total, he has given $220,000 to soft money groups and $529,621 in individual contributions.)
Interestingly, in 2008 he gave $30,800 to the Obama Victory Fund, $2,300 to the Obama campaign, and $28,500 to the Democratic National Committee. But in 2011, he gave $2,500 to the Romney campaign and nothing to Obama, reflecting how much of the finance world abandoned Obama in 2012 to tilt toward Romney. Now it appears that the Clinton campaign has won him back.
https://archive.is/J5CZE
https://theintercept.com/2015/12/04/clinton-super-pac-donor-is-former-goldman-exec-and-foreclosure-crisis-profiteer/