The most honest, the most transparent administration in history has another ethics problem with one of its key nominees.
Jacob Lew has been tapped to replace the departing OMB chief Peter Orszag:
President Obama's choice to be the government's chief budget officer received a bonus of more than $900,000 from Citigroup Inc. last year -- after the Wall Street firm for which he worked received a massive taxpayer bailout.The money was paid to Jacob Lew in January 2009, about two weeks before he joined the State Department as deputy secretary of state, according to a newly filed ethics form. The payout came on top of the already hefty $1.1 million Citigroup compensation package for 2008 that he reported last year.
Administration officials and members of Congress last year expressed outrage that executives at other bailed-out firms, such as American International Group Inc., awarded bonuses to top executives. State Department officials at the time steadfastly refused to say if Mr. Lew received a post-bailout bonus from Citigroup in response to inquiries from The Washington Times.
But Mr. Lew's latest financial disclosure report, provided by the State Department on Wednesday, makes clear that he did receive a significant windfall.
Legal? Sure. But it's not the nature of the compensation that's the problem, it's in the failure to disclose it that marks Mr. Lew as just another typical Obama appointee with a weird sense of entitlement and a lack of public spiritedness on ethics.
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