SEC mulled national security status for AIG details

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. securities regulators originally treated the New York Federal Reserve's bid to keep secret many of the details of the American International Group bailout like a request to protect matters of national security, according to emails obtained by Reuters.

CRISIS IN CREDIT

The request to keep the details secret were made by the New York Federal Reserve -- a regulator that helped orchestrate the bailout -- and by the giant insurer itself, according to the emails.

The emails from early last year reveal that officials at the New York Fed were only comfortable with AIG submitting a critical bailout-related document to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission after getting assurances from the regulatory agency that "special security procedures" would be used to handle the document.

The SEC, according to an email sent by a New York Fed lawyer on January 13, 2009, agreed to limit the number of SEC employees who would review the document to just two and keep the document locked in a safe while the SEC considered AIG's confidentiality request.

The SEC had also agreed that if it determined the document should not be made public, it would be stored "in a special area where national security related files are kept," the lawyer wrote. <snip>

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60N1S220100124

Protecting AIG and the Banksters is National Security. I guess anything that threatens the ruling class is now national security.

Since he was running the New York Fed at the time, and is already on record as pulling strings to protect AIG.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who has drawn fire for his role in the bailout, was set to testify before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday. Geithner, who led the New York Fed at the time of the AIG bailout, has said he was not privy to the discussions about what information AIG should or should not release to the public and the SEC. <snip>

He denies he knew of it but it's suspicious. At any rate, he's a little toxic, I would think. In addition to giving the appearance of being on the side of Wall Street the entire year, this casts a cloud.

the same sorts who ran cover for Madoff et al. -and who the administration will apparently never call to account for their behavior.