Chris Dodd Says the Obama Administration Told Him to Change the Amendment That Allowed AIG to Hand Out Bonuses

  When the news first broke that an amendment to the stimulus bill written by Chris Dodd was what ended up guaranteeing the $165 million in bonuses that AIG payed to it’s executives Chris Dodd denied it.

  First he claimed that he did not write any such amendment but that was a lie. He then claimed that he wrote the amendment but the wording was changed from what he had written but that was also a lie. Finally when doing an interview on CNN Chris Dodd admitted that it was he who wrote and he who also changed the wording of the amendment that helped AIG pay out the bonuses.

  Today Chris Dodd is pointing fingers, he claims that his original amendment was much more strict than the final version of the amendment but that he was told he must change it. And he is pointing the finger at the Obama administration

  That’s right, Cris Dodd is claiming that the Obama administration told him to take out the language that would have forbidden AIG to pay bonuses to it’s employees.

I did not want to make any changes to my original Senate-passed amendment” to the stimulus bill, “but I did so at the request of administration officials, who gave us no indication that this was in any way related to AIG,” Dodd said in a statement released last night. “Let me be clear — I was completely unaware of these AIG bonuses until I learned of them last week

  So while the president comes out and feigns outrage over these bonuses it is essential to remember that it was his administration that made these bonuses possible. Somebody in his administration, my guess would be the incompetent Geithner; but it could have been Obama himself, made Dodd amend the amendment that limited executive pay for companies that accepted bailout money to exempt contractually obligated bonuses, which these were.

  Now all of these politicians are pretending that they had no idea about this amendment, and it may be true because nobody read the bill, but the truth is that they voted to allow this to happen in the first place.

  Even if we choose to believe that Obama, Dodd, Geithner, and all of the others didn’t find out about the bonuses until two weeks ago, and with all of the lying and spinning that these guys are doing their credibility has been soiled, they still had time to stop this before it happened. But they tried to sneak it past us because the order to change the amendment came from the Obama administration, they were protecting Obama. They hoped that we wouldn’t catch on to what was happening and now they are caught in a firestorm.

 Now, for public relations reasons, they hold hearings and berate the AIG executives for taking the bonuses that they themselves guaranteed the executives would receive. Again hoping that we won’t see what is really going on.

  The Obama administration caused this mess and now Democrats in congress are trying to deflect the blame back onto the evil capitalists.