The Cohees gave money to her campaigns and had her to their home for a fundraiser and a company Christmas party, according to ethics investigators. OneUnited and Maxine Waters have a longstanding relationship. A majority of the stock-51 percent-was owned by Kevin Cohee, who serves as the bank’s CEO, and his wife, Teri Williams, who serves as president. OneUnited was founded in 1982, and grew through a series of acquisitions into the country’s largest minority-owned bank, with branches in Los Angeles, Miami, and Boston. One question Waters’ trial will likely answer is why OneUnited got such special treatment. No other bank, whether a small bank or a minority-owned institution, seems even to have merited individual attention in the memos. The documents also show staffers repeatedly proposing solutions that were specifically tailored to OneUnited, rather than to any broader group of banks. But the documents also show that while the specific crisis facing OneUnited was indeed presented, more than once, as a crisis facing minority-owned banks in general, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation pretty much immediately told all concerned that this crisis did not, in fact, exist. At times, those involved in helping OneUnited have argued that they were broadly focused on saving minority and small banks-which, if true, would have been a critically important task. ![]() ![]() And, oh, how it did, as documents I recently reviewed show. banking system, the rescue of one small, not-very-well-managed bank captured anyone’s attention in Washington. But one question that nagged at me was precisely how, in the midst of a full-scale meltdown of the U.S. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and a contributing editor at Columbia Journalism Review.The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have reported in detail about the involvement of other powerful people in OneUnited’s rescue-most notably, House financial services Chairman Barney Frank. The memoir's poignant dedication is to Frank's husband, Jim Ready, who, he writes, "made 'better late than never' my all-time favorite cliché." After a handful of long-term liaisons, he found an enduring love and was able to benefit from the same-sex marriage laws he had championed. The committee, however, concluded that Frank was guilty only of relatively minor infractions, including fixing Gobie's parking tickets, and recommended a reprimand.įrank survived and thrived, both personally and politically. Gobie claimed that Frank had countenanced the prostitute's use of his Capitol Hill apartment for sexual assignations with other men. Frank declines to provide details, referring readers instead to a congressional committee report that rejected what he calls Gobie's "more sensational, inaccurate accusations." In 1989, Frank had his own scandal, the exposure of his past relationship with a prostitute, Stephen Gobie, for whom he had done various favors. Gerry Studds, Frank's friend and Massachusetts colleague, already had become the first openly gay member of Congress - after news broke in 1983 of his involvement with a male House page. In 1987, impelled by events and his own discomfort, he carefully negotiated his public coming out with editors at the Globe. His discussion of these accomplishments is predictably dense.īy contrast, Frank talks only briefly about the psychological impact of his long commitment to secrecy and repression. In the memoir, he defends Clinton's failed effort to lift the ban on gays in the military, explaining the political maneuvering that yielded the flawed "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy.Īs chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, from 2007 to 2011, Frank helped fashion legislation curtailing credit-card abuses, secured passage of the controversial Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), and coauthored what he calls "the most important financial reforms since the Great Depression," the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. He continued to advocate for LGBT issues, sometimes tangling with the movement's leaders on timing and tactics. When he started serving in Congress, in 1981, after a stint as a state representative, Frank adopted what he calls a "hybrid" approach to his sexuality: open to the LGBT community and intimates but closeted to everyone else. ![]() Faulting his impatience and short attention span, he cites his strengths as the ability to work with "a broad cross section of people," assimilate information rapidly, and speak off the cuff. Frank paints himself not as an unrepentant ideologue but as a pragmatist.
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