Angelo Mozilo, the former CEO of Countrywide Financial Corp., has hired prominent Washington, D.C. based lawyer Brendan Sullivan to help defend him against an SEC lawsuit accusing him of securities fraud and insider trading. Sullivan is a senior partner at Williams & Connolly LLP. He is well known for representing Oliver North during the congressional hearings investigating the Iran-Contra affair in1987. Other former clients of Sullivan’s include former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens and former New York Stock Exchange Chief Executive Richard Grasso.

Countrywide was the largest mortgage company in the country before its liquidity dried up in 2007. In 2008 Bank of America Corp purchased the company. In June 2009 the SEC filed a civil lawsuit against Mozilo and two other former execs. Mozilo is accused of misleading investors about the quality of the loans his company made, which included subprime and adjustable rate mortgages, and of insider trading after he exercised 5.1 million Countrywide stock options in 2006 and 2007 when his company began to tank.