Onward and upward

Jamie Gorelick became famous doing government work.
To get rich, she had to go to Fannie Mae, where she practiced crony capitalism with such dexterity that she is now a multmillionaire, at least on paper.
It is a strange reversal of fortune for a woman who was, for a while, in the cross-hairs of those who investigated the government's failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks.
As a deputy attorney general in President Clinton's Justice Department, Gorelick, on March 4, 1995, wrote a legal memo that subsequently prohibited CIA agents and FBI agents from exchanging information regarding suspected terrorists.
The Bush administration's attorney general, John Ashcroft, described the impact of the "wall" as follows:
"In the days before Sept. 11, the wall specifically impeded the investiagion into Zacaria Moussoui, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. After the FBI arrested Mussaoui, agents became suspciious of his interest in commercial aircraft and sought approval for a criminal warrant to search his computer. The warrant was rejected because FBI officials feared breaching the wall."
"When the CIA finally told the FBI that al-Midhar and al-Hazmi were in the country in late August, agents in New York searched for the suspects. But, because of the wall, FBI headquarters refused to allow criminal investigators who knew the most about the most recent al-Qaeda attack to join the hunt for the suspected terrorists."
"At that time, a frustrated FBI investigator wrote headquarters, "Whatever has happened to this_someday someone will die and, wall or not, the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain problems."
Despite the controversy, Gorelik left the attorney general's office, without consequence, in 1997. After a short stint in private practice, she joined Fannie Mae as vice chairman, where she remained until 2003.
A federal investigation subsequently determined that, during her tenure, top executives had cooked the books of Fannie Mae, greatly exaggerating profits, so as to maximum their bonuses.
Gorelik left with a total take of $26.4 million for her six years.
Now, Fannie Mae is no longer a quasi-government bank. It is a government bank. The feds have seized it because so much of the bundled mortgage paper that it pioneered turned out to be worthless. Fannie Mae was broke.