According to the Associated Press, the government-chartered mortgage company Freddie Mac “secretly paid a Republican consulting firm $2 million to kill legislation that would have regulated and trimmed the mortgage finance giant and its sister company, Fannie Mae, three years before the government took control to prevent their collapse.” The target of the lobbying effort was a bill by Senator Charles Hagel that would have strengthened oversight and tightened regulation over Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. The bill was supported by Republicans and (sad to say) opposed by Democrats. The lobbying campaign, focused on 17 Republican senators, was successful in turning enough of them around to keep the bill from passing or even coming to the floor. The “turned” senators were Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Christopher "Kit" Bond and Jim Talent of Missouri, Conrad Burns of Montana, Mike DeWine of Ohio, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Olympia Snowe of Maine, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and George Allen of Virginia.

S. 190 - Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005

It is possible that all this was perfectly legal—but it stinks of corruption. In fact, it was corrupt.

I’m a lawyer, and I know how easy it is to find a way to violate the spirit of a law without violating the letter, and that is particularly true of criminal statutes, which must be strictly interpreted to avoid running afoul of the due process requirements of the U. S. Constitution. On the other hand, using corporate funds to lobby lawmakers for the specific purpose of passing legislation to keep the investigators away from an ongoing crime (or a conspiracy) ought to be a crime, both for the corporations and their officers, and for the lobbyists that do the actual dirty work. It is obstruction of justice, pure and simple.