While in the White House, Economist Received Personal Loans From Top Washington Lawyer
Gene Sperling received hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal loans from Howard Shapiro, a friend and partner at Washington law firm WilmerHale while serving as director of the National Economic Council. In 2011, Gene Sperling had a problem. He was working as President Obama’s chief economic advisor but his government salary did not cover his expenses. He and his wife lived in a Georgetown townhouse valued today at around $2 million, but did not have enough equity to qualify for a second mortgage or credit line. He didn’t want to sell the house and he wanted to keep working at a prestigious but relatively low-paid public service job. And so Sperling turned to a close friend from law school: Howard Shapiro. A top partner at the Washington powerhouse law firm WilmerHale, Shapiro had loaned Sperling money before and was willing to do so again. Sperling asked the White House Counsel’s office and the Office of Government Ethics for permission to borrow from Shapiro, whose firm frequently negotiates with the government on behalf of some of the nation’s leading corporations. Officials approved the transactions. So in 2011, Sperling borrowed between $100,000 and $250,000 from Shapiro at 5 percent, a rate that appears to be well below the interest banks charged at the time for comparable loans. Sperling listed his borrowing on his financial disclosure forms. In each of the next two years, Sperling went to Shapiro again, taking out two more loans that brought his debt to a total of between $300,000 and $600,000. (The forms require disclosure of a range, not specific figures.) The loans are unsecured. Sperling consolidated earlier loans from Shapiro, one made in 2006 and the 2011 loan, into the later ones. Today, Sperling is advising the Hillary Clinton campaign on economics. In a “Funny or Die” spoof <https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/funny-or-die-donald-decoded---crash-the-economy/2016/07/27/3478d9d4-5440-11e6-b652-315ae5d4d4dd_video.html> shown last month to the Democratic National Convention, he warned that Donald Trump’s policies would lead to dangerous levels of debt for the country. *https://www.propublica.org/article/white-house-economist-received-personal-loans-top-washington-lawyerCan you even imagine the uproar if this had been one of Trump's economic advisors? Me neither.* -- -- Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum * Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/ * It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls. * Read the latest breaking news, and more. --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "PoliticalForum" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
