RUSH: Let’s go to the audio sound bites and start with audio sound bite number nine. This is Obama yesterday afternoon on CNBC’s Street Signs. John Harwood said, ‘The timing of this Goldman suit, the fraud accusation by the SEC, anything political in that?’
OBAMA: I gave a speech about financial regulatory reform in 2007 before our current crisis. In 2008 before we fully knew what this crisis was gonna be, we released financial reform as a package over a year ago. And so we’re not Johnny-come-latelies to this thing. The SEC is an entirely independent agency —
RUSH: Oh, yeah, yeah
OBAMA: — we have no day-to-day control over —
RUSH: Oh, yeah, yeah.
OBAMA: — and they never discussed with us anything —
RUSH: Right.
OBAMA: — with respect to the charges that will be brought.
RUSH: Oh, yeah, yeah.
OBAMA: So the assumption that somehow there would be any attempt to interfere in an independent agency is completely false.
RUSH: Oh, yeah!
HARWOOD: So you could say categorically: No winks, no heads up in advance?
OBAMA: Categorically.
HARWOOD: No signal from anyone?
OBAMA: Categorically! We — we — we found out about it on CNBC.
RUSH: Oh, yeah. ‘We found out about it on CNBC,’ and the other guys read about it in the New York Times — and while the Goldman Sachs lawyers were negotiating the charges with the SEC, the Goldman Sachs CEO was visiting the White House four different times. But of course there was no collusion! It’s an independent agency. We don’t control it over there. That’s all they do is control things! They are thugs, community organizers as we discussed yesterday. Obama wins nothing on the basis of superiority of policy, superiority of argument, having the best ideas. Zilch, zero, nada. He doesn’t even care about that. He gets what he wants via thuggery, governing against the will of the people. Here is his next question from Harwood: ‘In 2008, you got a lot of money about a million dollars from Goldman Sachs. Greg Craig, your former lawyer, apparently is going to represent Goldman Sachs. In light of this case, do either of those things embarrass you?’
OBAMA: First of all, I got a lot of money from a lot of people, and the vast majority of money I got was from small donors all across the country. As far as my former, uhh, White House counsel Greg Craig, he’s one of the top lawyers in the country. Uhhh, he has a range of clients, uh, but we have the toughest ethics rules, uhhh, that any president’s ever had, and the one thing that he knows is — is that he cannot talk to the White House, he cannot lobby the White House. Uhh, once he left the White House, he cannot in any way use his former position to have any influence on us. And so, uhh, neither of those things, I think, are going to have any bearing on how we move forward on this issue of Wall Street.
RUSH: ‘Yeah, I’m not going to give back the money. Why should I give back the money? I’m not going to give back the money. A lot of people gave me money from Goldman Sachs, and they knew what I was going to do. They knew I was setting out to destroy Wall Street. They knew I was going to go in there and ruin New York, and they still gave me the money. Why should I give it back to them?’