According to the Washington Post:
The McCain campaign pushed back hard against the new Obama attack over the Keating Five, arguing that the Arizona senator was treated unfairly by the Senate ethics investigation.
John Dowd, the Washington lawyer who represented McCain during the Senate investigation, called the inquiry a "classic political smear job" by the Democrats running the Senate at the time, saying that they only included McCain to make sure that a Republican was among the targets. "John had not done anything wrong," Dowd said.
Dowd's point of view was amplified by Robert Bennett, the Washington lawyer and Democrat who served as special counsel to the Senate Ethics Committee. "I felt it was unfair for McCain to be included as part of the Keating Five." Bennett stressed that he was not speaking as part of the campaign, though he noted he also represented McCain in his recent battles with the New York Times.
The sharp defense of McCain by Dowd was in contrast to McCain's previous contrition about his involvement in the matter. He told the New York Times in 1999 that going into the meetings with regulators was a mistake. "Going into that room gave a definite appearance of impropriety," he said. McCain was ultimately exonerated by the Ethics Committee, which did fault him for exercising poor judgment in attending two meetings with federal regulators about their case against Keating, a once high-flying savings and loans owner who contributed $112,000 to McCain campaigns. The collapse of Keating's thrift ultimately cost taxpayers billions, and Obama's campaign mounted a full-scale assault today on McCain's involvement, with an ad and short web documentary questioning his judgment.
In an e-mail to supporters, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe argued that the Keating Five affair highlighted McCain's support for a broad philosophy of deregulation that is eerily similiar to the crisis of today. "During the savings and loan crisis of the late '80s and early '90s, McCain's political favors and aggressive support for deregulation put him at the center of the fall of Lincoln Savings and Loan, one of the largest in the country. More than 23,000 investors lost their savings. Overall, the savings and loan crisis required the federal government to bail out the savings of hundreds of thousands of families and ultimately cost American taxpayers $124 billion," Plouffe wrote.
Sometimes in politics, memories fail.
In a conference call with reporters, attorney John Dowd was asked about a specific part of the Keating Five inquiry, the fact that Cindy McCain and her father had invested in a Keating strip mall.
"It was part of the inquiry, but it did not -- John was unconnected to that and unaware of it at the time, and did not participate in it," Dowd said.
But thanks to the quick research skills of Democratic partisans, here's John McCain's answer to an attorney who asked him about that very investment during the ethics committee hearings in 1991.
"Sometime in 1986, I was told by Mr. Delgado, who was Executive Vice President of my father-in-law's company, that they were going to invest in a shopping center and that the investment -- the project -- was being put together by a subsidiary of American Continental," McCain said. "He later told me that they -- that that had happened. And I had no interest in it and just noted in passing that this investment took place."
The attorney asking the question during the hearing? John Dowd.
Remember, months into his Senate career in the late 1980s, McCain made what he has called "the worst mistake of my life" by participating in meetings with banking regulators on behalf of Keating.
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