A lot of people warned Eric Schneiderman not to take this job, which used his watchdog reputation to hide the Obama administration’s inaction:
WASHINGTON — New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has privately criticized the Obama administration and the Department of Justice for not aggressively investigating dodgy mortgage deals that helped trigger the financial crisis, according to senators and congressional aides who met with him this month.
New York’s top prosecutor is co-chair of the administration’s year-old Residential Mortgage Backed Securities Working Group, an initiative that President Barack Obama called for in his State of the Union address last year. In a sign of Schneiderman’s importance to the group, the White House seated him behind Michelle Obama during the speech.
Schneiderman, a Democrat who has attempted to investigate Wall Street, expressed his frustrations with the administration earlier this month during private meetings with Democratic senators on Capitol Hill, arguing that he was “naive” when he first entered into the partnership with the Justice Department, lawmakers and their aides said.
Critics of Schneiderman’s collaboration, which came in exchange for his assent to a national mortgage settlement, warned at the time that the attorney general was being played. His recent criticisms of the administration may renew allegations that he, too, has compiled a lackluster enforcement record.
Schneiderman has recently directed his attention to working with lawmakers and outside groups to pressure the administration to toughen its approach. He traveled to Washington for meetings with Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Carl Levin (D-Mich.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), among others, according to people who attended the meetings. The four senators have been among the loudest critics of the Obama administration’s efforts to hold the financial industry accountable for alleged wrongdoing, charging they have not gone far enough.
Here we are again with ‘public’ and ‘private’. He “privatley criticized the Obama administaration.” He should publicly criticize the administration. But if he does that then he’ll blow his chances to be the next governor of New York. Which is why he took this job in the first place. To increase his public (there’s that word again) profile. Eric is a politician. And we all know what politicians do and why they get into the political game in the first place, right?
Amazing how ‘rising stars’ in the Democratic Party are so easily co-opted. One could easily believe that he was never really serious about his investigations in the first place. Kabuki always needs the turn coat/traitor/stabbed in the back character. And what better way to instill a sense of fatalistic despair among the unrich.
So now everybody will detest him: the true lefties who always saw him as the opportunist he is and now Obama and his Bots. Good job, Eric.
He has tarnished the name, “Eric”.
Of course he was co-opted, uh, used.
I’m sure Magic Johnson felt the same way.