White House didn't know about SEC decision beforehand

The White House didn't influence the timing of a lawsuit against Wall Street mega-firm Goldman Sachs to help bolster efforts to pass financial reform legislation, a spokesman said Monday. 

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the Obama administration was "absolutely not" notified before the Securities and Exchange Commission announced the suit on Friday alleging the firm defrauded "investors by misstating and omitting key facts about a financial product tied to subprime mortgages as the U.S. housing market was beginning to falter."

Republicans and banking lobbyists are questioning whether the White House coordinated the suit with the financial reform bill hitting snags in the Senate. 

"In all honesty, again, I want to stress again that we play no role in what the SEC does, it's an independent agency," Gibbs said. "I think there is plenty of evidence of the necessity for financial reform long before the announcement on Friday. The actions that Wall Street undertook over the course of many years to get us to that point where we saw the collapse that we did is proof enough that something has to change, and something has to change this year."

With all 41 Senate Republicans united against the proposed financial regulatory reform bill, Senate Banking Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) has left no doubt he thinks the case should help Democrats argument to move forward with the measure while painting Republicans as pro-Wall Street. 

"By not enacting our legislation, by filibustering it, stopping it, we leave the American public vulnerable once again to the kind of shenanigans that have occurred in our large financial institutions across this country," Dodd said earlier today.