McCain questions Obama V.P. vetter

Jim Johnson, one of Barack Obama's key vetters of possible running mates, is getting some of the vetting treatment himself.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that Johnson, the former CEO of Fannie Mae, received more than $7 million in favorable loans from Countrywide Financial Corp. with the help of the firm's chief executive, Angelo Mozilo. One of the loans came while Johnson was still at Fannie Mae, the federal mortgage guarantor that works closely with Countrywide, one of the nation's largest mortgage lenders.

Obama's campaign suggested its surrogates call the story "overblown and irrelevant," saying the loans were above-board. Johnson, who is on a three-person vetting team with Eric Holder and Caroline Kennedy, was on Capitol Hill today to talk to congressional leaders about possible vice presidential nominees.

But John McCain's campaign has been flogging the story all day, suggesting that Obama is showing faulty judgment in hiring and that he is being hypocritical because he criticized former Democratic rival Hillary Clinton over her ties to Countrywide.

"There is nothing 'overblown and irrelevant' about millions of Americans facing foreclosure and Barack Obama entrusting his most important decision as a presidential candidate to a man who has accepted millions in special loans from a subprime mortgage lender," Tucker Bounds, a McCain spokesman, said in a statement this evening.