Maxine Waters Answers Bank Bailout Questions

Inglewood (myFOXla.com) - Congresswoman Maxine Waters held a town hall meeting in Inglewood on Saturday, days after allegations surfaced that she helped bail out a bank her husband had ties to.

There were no questions about the issue during the town hall itself, but Ms. Waters addressed questions about the bank controversy outside the meeting.

On Friday, Rep. Waters, D-Inglewood, denied any wrongdoing amid reports her husband had financial ties to a bank she helped request $50 million in bailout funds.

"Recent reports have raised questions about my advocacy on behalf of minority banks," Waters said in a statement. "Ultimately, however, these articles only revealed one thing: I am indeed an advocate for minority banks."

Waters said she also has disclosed all of her financial interests in official filings.

The New York Times reported today that Treasury Department officials were taken aback that Waters requested a meeting in September on behalf of executives at Boston-based OneUnited, because her husband, Sidney Williams, had served on the bank's board until early last year and has owned at least $250,000 of its stock.

With branches in Los Angeles and Miami, OneUnited is one of the nation's largest black-owned banks.

The officials said the session with nearly a dozen senior banking regulators was intended to allow minority-owned banks and their trade association to discuss the losses they incurred from the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but that Kevin Cohee, OneUnited's chief executive, instead pleaded for special assistance for his bank.

"Here you had a tiny community bank that comes in and they are not proposing a broader policy -- they were asking for help for themselves," Stephen Lineberry, a former Treasury aide in the Bush administration who attended the meeting, told The Times. "I don't remember that ever happening before."

Treasury officials told The Times that Waters, who is a member of the House Financial Services Committee, did not disclose her ties to OneUnited to Treasury officials, and that they only learned of them later.

"It is upsetting to me," Jeb Mason, the deputy assistant secretary for business affairs at Treasury during the Bush administration, whose office helped set up the meeting, told the newspaper. "This is something that was potentially politically explosive and embarrassing to the administration. They should have at least let us know."

OneUnited did not get the $50 million it requested but received a cash infusion of $12 million in December through the Treasury's bank bailout effort, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., told the Los Angeles Times he advised Waters last fall to "stay out of it" because he knew her husband had served on the bank board.

Frank also told the newspaper he was unaware of any contacts Waters may have had with Treasury.

Waters, who won election to Congress in 1990, has previously come under scrutiny for activities that benefited her family financially, the Los Angeles Times reported. The newspaper in 2004 reported that her family members made more than $1 million by doing business with companies, candidates and causes that the congresswoman helped.