The enemy of my friend is my... friend?

The Wall Street Journal today notes that while Hillary Clinton has been holding up Countrywide Financial Corp. and CEO Angelo Mozilo as epitomizing misplaced priorities and values of lenders during the housing boom, one of her allies thinks she's wrong on that count.

Former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros -- Hillary's husband gave him that job, and he's been campaigning for her in Texas -- tells the Journal that "Countrywide is not the Enron that some people have described it as."

Of course, Cisneros would have to say something to that effect, since he made more than $5 million sitting on Countrywide's board of directors before resigning in October, the Journal reports.

Another prominent Democrat, former California Treasurer Kathleen Brown (pictured), resigned from her seat on the Countrywide board last March (see previous post).

Kathleen Brown's brother, Jerry, is California's attorney general. So far, Jerry Brown hasn't made much of a fuss about mortgage lending practices during the boom -- at least not compared to his counterpart in New York, Andrew Cuomo, who's investigating just about everybody who's had anything to do with originating mortgages and packaging them into securities sold to Wall Street investors.

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