Two partners at major law firms have likely been holding their breath since WikiLeaks released an email on November 1 showing that Obama had vetted Hillary Clinton for Vice President and the review came back “too critical,” thus leading Obama to select Joe Biden as his Vice Presidential pick during the 2008 campaign. The vetting memorandum on Clinton shows in the email thread to have been transmitted with the email but WikiLeaks has not provided it – yet.

According to the email, which carries a capitalized heading of “CONFIDENTIAL,” the vetting of Clinton had been done by James Hamilton, then a law partner at Bingham McCutchen LLP. Hamilton is now a partner at Morgan Lewis, a firm with a long history of ties to Wall Street. His official bio shows that he “served as the Clinton-Gore transition counsel for nominations and confirmations,” “as the principal Clinton White House vetter for Supreme Court nominations,” “was in charge of vetting vice presidential candidates in 2000 for Al Gore,” did the same for John Kerry in 2004 and for Obama in 2008. His bio also indicates that he “vetted candidates for Cabinet, the Department of Justice, White House, and Supreme Court for the Obama administration.”

Upon receipt of the email and memorandums on September 4, 2008, Michael Froman issued an email to other members of Obama’s Transition Team stating: “Per our discussion, please do not circulate any further.” Froman was an executive at the insolvent Wall Street behemoth, Citigroup. At the time of this email, Citigroup had been secretly receiving tens of billions of dollars in below-market-rate loans from the Federal Reserve to prop up its insolvent carcass and stood as the poster child for gross mismanagement. Citigroup would go on to receive the largest taxpayer bailout in U.S. history. Froman was employed at the very division of the bank that blew it up before the year was out.

Notwithstanding Froman’s ties to Citigroup, Froman was in charge of staffing the cabinet and subcabinet positions for Obama’s first term. Among the emails released by WikiLeaks, there are 351 emails which show the tight reins Froman held in the selection of Obama’s administration. (See related articles below.)

The September 4, 2008 email was forwarded to Cassandra Butts, a member of Obama’s Transition Team, who responded to Froman as follows:

“Yes, of course. It should be noted that Mark Patterson didn’t share the Biden, Clinton or Edwards memos with me when he gave me the hard copies on Tuesday. He was concerned that the Clinton memo was too critical in ways that didn’t need to be shared outside of the vp process, the Biden memo was no longer relevant to our process and the same for Edwards. I agreed with Mark’s judgment on this, and it definitely raises the importance of keeping these memos very closely held.”

The reference to the Biden memo no longer being relevant is because Obama had already announced his pick of Biden as his Vice President on Saturday, August 23, 2008.

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