Oh, wow. He seriously needs to dump that info. IMO, this would be more important than the state dept cables, and more justified.

Or, he doesn't need to bother, because it's going to show once again a bunch of stuff that we very much don't like but very much already know: that Countrywide came as close to the line as possible, overstepping it regularly, in pushing subprime residential mortgages to people who couldn't possibly afford them, and then pushed the ratings agencies hard to help get those mortgages packaged into deceptive AAA-rated MBS's --- all of which would be (a) horrible, (b) unlikely to be cleanly prosecuted as a crime, and (c) not a revelation.

Read Joe Nocera; one of Countrywide's biggest competitors, Ameriquest, was literally handing out methamphetamine to its dealers to keep them awake to push bullshit second and third cash-out refi mortgages. Those shitheads owned the Rangers stadium and were eventually sold to Citigroup.

By not actually illuminating the issue, WL could instead split whatever opposition to the played-out mortgage fraud issue into WL-supporters and WL-opponents who will synthesize new opinions about banking regulation based on emotions; in otherwords, the process and the leak will become the story, not the lack of oversight and regulation that allowed the events being leaked to happen.

Or not.