RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events The Great Crash of 2008

Republican presidential nominee John McCain sparked a furious exchange of campaign attacks Thursday night with the release of a television ad linking Democratic nominee Barack Obama to a former Fannie Mae chief who was forced out by an accounting scandal.

The ad accuses Obama of using Franklin Raines as an adviser, a claim based on a July Washington Post profile of Raines that reported he had "taken calls from Barack Obama's presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters."

The Obama campaign disputes that Raines ever advised Obama or the campaign.

Raines, who served as head of the White House Office of Management and Budget under Bill Clinton, left Fannie Mae in late December 2004 amid allegations of accounting irregularities, saying he was holding himself accountable by taking an early retirement. Fannie Mae agreed to pay $400 million in fines in the wake of the scandal.

Earlier this year, Raines settled with federal regulators who had been after him to try to recover hundreds of millions of dollars that he and other executives made while Fannie was misstating its earnings. None of the $25 million he agreed to pay came out of his pocket, according to the Post.

In addition to the accounting scandal, McCain's ad ties Raines to the recent crisis facing the giant of the secondary-mortgage giant, which was taken over by the federal government earlier this month.

"Raines made millions. Fannie Mae collapsed. Taxpayers stuck with the bill," the announcer in the ad says.

While Fannie Mae was certainly weakened by the accounting scandal earlier this decade, it is highly questionable whether that had any bearing on its inability to survive the national home foreclosure tide on its own.

But the potential political fallout of Obama's ties to the company is clear.

Despite his short tenure on the national stage, Obama is the second-leading recipient of campaign contributions from the political action committees and employees of Fannie Mae and sister government-sponsored enterprise Freddie Mac since 1989 -- $165,400 in all -- according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks the financing of congressional and presidential campaigns.

McCain's total is $21,550, according to CRP.

Obama has an even stronger link to the former leadership of Fannie Mae: He tapped another former Fannie CEO, Jim Johnson, to head his vice presidential selection committee. But Johnson was forced aside when it was revealed that he had been the beneficiary of a low-interest loan from Countrywide Financial Corp.