Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain’s national campaign general co-chair was being paid by a Swiss bank to lobby Congress about the U.S. mortgage crisis at the same time he was advising McCain about his economic policy, federal records show.

“Countdown with Keith Olbermann” reported Tuesday night that lobbying disclosure forms, filed by the giant Swiss bank UBS, list McCain’s campaign co-chair, former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, as a lobbyist dealing specifically with legislation regarding the mortgage crisis as recently as Dec. 31, 2007.

Gramm joined the bank in 2002 and had registered as a lobbyist by 2004. UBS filed paperwork deregistering Gramm on April 18 of this year. Gramm continues to serve as a UBS vice chairman.

News of Gramm’s involvement as a paid advocate for the banking industry, simultaneous with his unpaid work on McCain’s economic policies, comes as McCain’s campaign continues to reel from the purge of four other lobbyists. Two weeks ago, McCain banned lobbyists from advising him on the same subjects covered by their lobbying work.
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When Gramm chaired the Senate Banking Committee, he wrote and passed deregulatory legislation in more than one industry, establishing himself as a pre-eminent foe of government regulation. McCain’s March 26 speech recommended further deregulation of the banking industry as his response to the mortgage crisis.
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In 1999, Gramm successfully undid the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, removing the decades-old wall between commercial banking, which was heavily regulated, and investment banking, which was not. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act did not extend significant new regulation to investment banking.

Senators Lindsay Graham and Joe Lieberman, both campaign co-chairman, also both sit on the Vets for Freedom board of advisors. The group's executive director, Pete Hegseth, is on McCain's Virginia steering committee along with the group's treasurer, Wade Zirkle.

"America has assumed this obligation before," Bush said in prepared remarks released by the White House. "After World War II we helped Germany and Japan build free societies and strong economies. These efforts took time and patience, and as a result Germany and Japan grew in freedom and prosperity and are now allies of the United States."

The result, Bush says, was "generations of security and peace" in the United States.

"Today we must do the same in Afghanistan and Iraq," he says in the prepared comments. "And by helping these young democracies grow in freedom and prosperity we will once again reap the benefits in generations of security and peace."

Today's wars aren't over yet. As reconstruction unfolds, the enemy keeps fighting — not national militaries but a complex mix of militias and terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Another difference: It remains in debate within the country whether the pre-emptive Iraq war has bolstered U.S. security or weakened it. Bush has expressed no doubts it was warranted.