is lashing back at newspaper investigations that accuse her of exerting undue influence in securing bailout money for a bank. Waters says she did nothing improper and didn’t even attend a meeting at the center of the controversy.

“Although both my supporters and detractors often refer to me as influential, the truth is that I had no influence on what Bush administration officials in the Treasury Department or other departments did,” Waters said in a statement Friday.

The New York Times reported Friday that Waters helped arrange a meeting last fall at which an executive of OneUnited, one of the nation’s largest black-owned banks, sought \$50 million for his own bank. The meeting was supposed to be on behalf of the National Bankers Association (NBA), an association that represents minority banks, and address problems that minority banks were having because of the failure of Fannie Mae.

The officials said they were later surprised to learn that Waters had family ties to the bank. Ms. Waters’s husband, Sidney Williams, had served on the bank’s board until early last year and has owned at least \$250,000 of its stock. The Wall Street Journal ran a story Thursday reporting Waters’s financial connections to the bank.

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Waters’s supporters also see partisanship at play, noting that the main on-the-record source for the story was a Bush administration political appointee, Jeb Mason, who once worked for former Bush deputy chief of staff Karl Rove.

Read more: http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/rep.-waters-denies-...