The Washington Times front page, top-of-the-fold story today is about Penny Pritzker, the finance chairwoman of Barack Obama‘s campaign. Pritzker was a “top official” at Superior Bank, which ultimately failed in 2001. According to a report issued in the wake of the collapse, Superior Bank had a “high-risk business strategy, which was focused on the generation of significant volumes of subprime mortgage and automobile loans for securitization and sale in the secondary market…The bank also suffered from poor lending practices, improper record keeping and accounting, and ineffective board and management supervision.”

The Chicago Sun-Times wrote a similar story back in the spring about Pritzker. It noted rather hilariously (or maybe not hilariously at all) that:

“All three major candidates for president have high advisers embarrassed by banking scandals. Republican candidate John McCain himself got caught up in the Charles Keating savings and loan scandal in the ’80s. Hillary Clinton‘s campaign manager Maggie Williams was paid about $200,000 to sit on the board of Delta Financial, which did subprime lending of the type Clinton and Obama have complained about on the stump. Pritzker’s brother J.B. Pritzker, part of the trust that owned Superior, though he had no management role, is a national co-chairman of Clinton’s campaign.”

Back to Penny Pritzker, who stepped down as chairwoman of the bank’s board in 1994, but then became a member of the board of the bank’s holding company. The Times article focuses on 1,400 underinsured Superior Bank depositors that were not able to recoup all of their money when the bank folded. Says one of the victims:

“[Obama] knows the Pritzker family. He knows what happened in Illinois. He knows that Superior Bank was one of the first to securitize subprime mortgages,” Mr. Courtney said. “He talks about change and helping people find a better way of life, but he has distanced himself from the fact that Superior helped ignite the nation’s subprime crisis and that Penny Pritzker and her family walked away from it and us.”

The same man also notes another “galling” fact:

“The Pritzker family gave $30 million to the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine a year after the bank closed while he still awaits his own money.”