We know that Rajat Gupta was a big Obama supporter.

We know that Goldman Sachs switched its loyalties to Mitt Romney earlier this year, mainly out of animosity to Dodd-Frank, which they claim is crushing the banks.

As early as last year  ThirdPoint LLC, said to be part of a Michael Milken-related market racketeering network, attacked Obama.

[Third Point is a leading hedge-fund that’s  credibly alleged to have colluded with Goldman Sachs in collusive raids on rivals. Documents accidentally released in a lawsuit against Goldman Sachs by Patrick Byrne of Overstock now show that Goldman did in fact pass on non-public information of its clients to select hedge-funds .

ThirdPoint has since cut stakes in Goldman Sachs in March this year, probably sensing that the firm is due for a huge beating.]

GS’s troubles are ongoing.

In March 2012, Greg Smith, a senior manager, trashed the firm, specifically Lloyd Blankfein and Gary Cohn, for corrupting the culture…..as if that were possible.

Two other Goldman executives are under investigation for tipping caught on wire-taps, Henry King and David Loeb.

[This is the evidence that Judge Jed Rakoff wouldn’t let the jury hear. It was the core of the defense’s argument that, not Gupta, but the other proven tipsters at Goldman has passed on the Buffett tip. The jury, confused by hearsay that was wrongly included of Gupta talking about non-public non-material information to Galleon, hung the Galleon case on him and convicted on this insubstantial evidence.]

Last year,  after the SEC first began administrative proceedings against Rajat Gupta (March 2011) we heard that Lloyd Blankfein had hired a big-shot DC criminal attorney (August 23, 2011).

Then, in Feb 2012,  sources close to Goldman reported to the NY Post that the nine month long investigation would likely not lead to criminal charges.

Why not?

How did they become so sure that Blankfein wouldn’t be facing charges?

Did they fix the deal around that time?

Only a month later, March 2012, the defense reluctantly began sending particulars of its charges to Gupta.

Yet it had been investigating Big Raj for a decade, and had been on the Galleon case since 2007.

What took so long? Was there any pressure from Goldman?

Was the fix in by then, and is that why Goldman insiders were so sure that Blankfein would be off the hook?

After all. Gupta is a RETIRED director at Goldman, and his main professional association is with McKinsey, not with Goldman.

He had nothing to do with the trading culture of Goldman that was the source of its problems.

He just sat on a board, which probably met a few times a year. The public, angry at Goldman, wouldn’t know that they’d been fed Gupta, to protect the core of Goldman itself.

Did Blankfein figure out that throwing overboard a South Asian patsy, albeit a powerful one, one associated with the loss of jobs to Americans, would save his skin in the media, dominated, rightly, by anger over the financial crisis?  Did it help that Gupta was also an Obama donor?

That Blankfein had an eye on PR at this time is clear because around the same time that he  made some other interesting moves, as I noted earlier.

1. He announced his support for Romney (January 2012)

2. He told the press that Goldman was in the clear (February 2012)

(This was around the time the defense was asking for particulars of the charges to be sent)

3. Bharara starts sharing Brady material (Feb 2012)

In March 2012, a month later, Bharara was finally forced to disclose what specifically he had on Rajat Gupta.

4. Blankfein was hired as a public spokesman for gay marriage by Human Rights Campaign  (February, 2012).

The timing of all these events is surely extremely suggestive…

Blankfein’s attorney, Reid Weingarten, represented WorldCom CEO, Bernie Ebbers, who was convicted in 2005 of fraudulent accounting, in the largest such scandal in US history until the Bernie Madoff ponzi.

Charles Gasparino at The New York Post:

“Goldman Sachs will not support Obama,” the firm’s CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, muttered at a recent dinner.

It was a meeting with the CEO of Blackrock, Larry Fink, himself another of Wall Street’s top Obama boosters back in 2008. But “Larry is looking for someone to support this time,” a friend of Fink told me.

Blankfein has apparently found his pick. According to people who know him, Blankfein’s bet is that Romney will win the Republican nomination fairly early, putting him in a decent position to win the presidency — and in office does his best to water down some of the more insane aspects of the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law.

Some caveats: Romney barely won the Iowa caucuses and still faces much conservative skepticism about his various flirtations with big government as Massachusetts governor. Goldman still has many committed Democrats, and Wall Street support can be fickle. Blankfein might well reverse his bet if Obama takes a commanding lead in the polls.

But with the polls fairly even, the firm so far seems to be betting big that the GOP base will conclude that Romney has the best chance of winning over independents and beating the president in November. That would allow a reversal of Obama’s most leftist policies — including financial reform, which threatens to strangle Goldman and all the big banks while doing little to address the core problems that led to the 2008 collapse.

What makes Goldman’s move to the right so striking is just how far to the left it was in 2008. The Goldman community gave more than a $1 million to the 2008 Obama campaign, bested only by donors tied to the ultraliberal University of California. But the latest contribution records (through the end of September) show that Goldman-linked givers barely crack the top 20 of Obama donors, with a little more than $50,000 toward his 2012 re-election effort.

By contrast, Goldman-linked donors are Romney’s leading source of corporate campaign cash, spending $367,200 on his 2012 effort so far. That’s nearly $127,000 more than the firm put up for 2008 GOP nominee John McCain.

Not that Goldman has suddenly become a hotbed of Tea Party conservatism. Its beef with Obama is focused almost entirely on Dodd-Frank’s impact on its bottom line.”