President Obama’s new National Security Advisor spent the decade prior to joining the White House as a legal advisor to powerful interests including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, and as a lobbyist for Fannie Mae, where he oversaw the mortgage giant’s aggressive campaign to undermine the credibility of a probe into its accounting irregularities, according to government reports and public disclosure forms.
Thomas E. Donilon has been formally advising Obama on national security matters since the president’s transition to the White House, and he worked in President Clinton’s state department during the 1990s. But in between these high-profile public-sector assignments, Donilon was a highly paid lobbyist who represented an array of well-heeled and powerful clients, including former Republican New Jersey Gov. Christie Todd Whitman and Obama’s 2008 campaign fundraising chairman, billionaire heiress Penny Pritzker.
After a stint at the law firm O’Melveny & Myers, where Donilon was registered as a lobbyist for Fannie Mae, he took on full-time work with the mortgage giant as executive vice president for law and policy. Donilon’s name appears on Fannie Mae’s public lobbying disclosure reports between 2000 and 2005.