WASHINGTON — Elizabeth Warren, named by President Barack Obama to set up the new consumer-finance agency, was paid $90,000 this year to be an expert witness in a class-action lawsuit against some of the nation’s biggest banks.
Warren, who at the time she did the work was head of the Congressional Oversight Panel monitoring the $700 billion bank bailout, was retained by a law firm that represents retailers suing credit-card networks Visa and MasterCard and banks including Citigroup, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase for alleged antitrust violations in setting card-processing rates, her financial-disclosure forms show.
Warren said she first discussed being an expert witness before joining the oversight panel in November 2008. She said she cleared the outside work with the panel’s ethics counsel.
As an appointee to a part-time government post, Warren was permitted to continue doing outside work. Some ethics attorneys said her work created at least the appearance of a conflict of interest, given her leverage over banks as head of the watchdog group.
“She should have had the judgment to say no,” said Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor who was chief ethics lawyer in the White House counsel’s office under President George W. Bush and last year published a scholarly work on government ethics. Bloomberg News
