The announcement today that Fortress Investment Group CEO Daniel Mudd is taking a leave of absence from the $43.6-billion-in-assets publicly traded alternative investment firm should hardly come as a surprise. Last week the Securities and Exchange Commission took the unusual step of filing a lawsuit against Mudd, former CEO of the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae to you and me), and Richard Syron, former CEO of the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac), alleging that both understated the subprime mortgage losses of the two publicly traded mortgage lenders by hundreds of billions of dollars.

It was always going to be difficult to ride out such a suit, and today Mudd released a statement saying he is taking a leave of absence from Fortress to “ensure that any time or attention I need to focus on matters outside of Fortress will not affect the business of operations of the company.”....

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