Swamped: Trump Appoints to Ex-Im Bank Disgraced Ex-Congressman

Breitbart
Apr. 17, 2017

On Monday’s Breitbart News Daily, Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer discussed President Trump’s appointment of former Alabama Congressman Spencer Bachus to the board of directors for the Export-Import Bank.

SiriusXM host Alex Marlow noted that Bachus, a Republican, holds the unenviable distinction of being the only politician Andrew Breitbart called upon to resign during his lifetime:

Schweizer recalled that Bachus was chairman of the House Financial Services Committee during the 2008 financial crisis, when he “did a massive amount of option stock trading.”

“The trading was done with inside information that he was getting on briefings,” said Schweizer. “He ended up doing very, very well. Most option stock traders, who are betting that the market’s either going to go up or going to go down, 75 to 80 percent of them don’t make money or they lose money. It’s a very risky investment strategy.”

“Spencer Bachus did extremely well, and here’s why. I’ll just give you one example,” he continued. “September 18, 2008, is sort of a monumental moment in the 2008 financial crisis. That’s when Hank Paulson, the Treasury secretary, and the head of the Fed, Ben Bernanke, went to Capitol Hill to meet with a handful of senior congressmen, including Spencer Bachus. It was a secretive meeting, and what they did was, they made all of the congressmen put their phones away in the corner because they didn’t want anybody recording the conversation or texting anybody about it. According to Paulson in his memoirs, he painted an apocalyptic vision of what was coming down the pike. He said, ‘Look, the stock market could lose half of its valuation. We could have a massive failure of banks, et cetera.’”

Read More