Massachusetts Democrat Congressman Barney Frank, who pushed to deregulate Fannie Mae throughout the 1990s, had a gay lover who was a Fannie Mae executive at the forefront of the agency’s push to relax lending restrictions.
Herb Moses, who was Fannie’s assistant director for product initiatives, worked at the government-sponsored enterprise from 1991 to 1998, while Frank was on the House Banking Committee, which had jurisdiction over Fannie Mae.
“It’s absolutely a conflict,” said Dan Gainor, vice president of the Business & Media Institute. “He was voting on Fannie Mae at a time when he was involved with a Fannie Mae executive. How is that not germane?”
“If this had been his ex-wife and he was Republican, I would bet every penny I have – or at least what’s not in the stock market – that this would be considered germane,” added Gainor, a T. Boone Pickens Fellow. “But everybody wants to avoid it because he’s gay. It’s the quintessential double standard.”
Frank met Moses in 1987, the same year he became the first openly gay member of Congress. The two lived together in a Washington home until they broke up in 1998, a few months after Moses ended his seven-year tenure at Fannie Mae, where he was the assistant director of product initiatives. According to National Mortgage News, Moses “helped develop many of Fannie Mae’s affordable housing and home improvement lending programs.”
“I am the only member of the congressional gay spouse caucus,” Moses wrote in the Washington Post in 1991. “On Capitol Hill, Barney always introduces me as his lover.”
In 1991, the year Moses was hired by Fannie, Frank pushed the agency to loosen regulations on mortgages for two- and three-family homes, even though they were defaulting at twice and five times the rate of single homes, respectively.
Three years later, President Clinton’s Department of Housing and Urban Development tried to impose a new regulation on Fannie, but was thwarted by Frank. Clinton now blames such Democrats for planting the seeds of today’s economic crisis.
“I think the responsibility that the Democrats have may rest more in resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was president, to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” Clinton said recently.
outright criminal. Frank needs to be prosecuted.
Funny how pics of Moses have been removed from internet. Mr. Frank has unmeasurable power, one would think.