For the entire Barney Frank profile, click here.

Selected highlights from the Barney Frank profile:

… Upon joining the House of Representatives [in 1980], Barney Frank developed a reputation for consistently voting to slash funding for the CIA, the FBI, and the U.S. military. He also advocated the loosening of immigration-law exclusions that previously had served to prevent people holding totalitarian or anti-American ideologies from entering the country, and to facilitate the deportation of legal aliens who had caused unrest or engaged in subversive activities on American soil. Frank derisively categorized such exclusions as “relics of the McCarthy era” and as manifestations of ”the anti-gay, anti-free-speech McCarthyite hangover.” …

In 1987 Frank publicly announced that he was a homosexual. Three years later the House of Representatives, acting on the recommendation of the House Ethics Committee, voted by a 408-18 margin to reprimand the congressman for having ”reflected discredit upon the House.” At issue was the fact that Frank had paid for sex from a male prostitute named Steve Gobie, whom he subsequently hired as a personal ”aide.” Frank also had paid for Gobie’s psychiatric treatments; had used his political influence to dismiss 33 parking tickets which the prostitute had been issued; and had written, on congressional stationery, letters on Gobie’s behalf to Virginia probation officials. Gobie, for his part, had used Frank’s Capitol Hill apartment as a house of prostitution for 18 months. The congressman later claimed that he had been unaware of Gobie’s illegal activities inside the apartment, and that he had fired the aide upon learning of them….

Barney Frank has had numerous close ties to the mortgage-lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both of which suffered economic collapse in 2008 as a result of government policies mandating that they lower their lending standards in order to ensure that larger numbers of undercapitalized borrowers — particularly nonwhite minorities — were approved for mortgage loans (so-called “subprime loans”). Frank, who between 1989 and 2008 received campaign contributions totaling $42,350 from Fannie and Freddie, actively promoted these policies….

Frank has defended ACORN and other, likeminded activist groups that have spearheaded the movement demanding that under-qualified minority borrowers be given access to subprime loans and lower eligibility standards. According to the congressman, these activist organizations are composed of ”people who are trying very hard to preserve some equity and some social justice,” and “people whose only crime was to offend powerful political interests because they cared about equity.”

For the entire Barney Frank profile, click here.

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