WASHINGTON — A Democratic lawmaker Wednesday alleged that Republican members of a special financial-crisis investigation panel were driven more by politics than by probing the causes of the crisis.
Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, released a 40-page report accusing Republican commissioners of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission of gearing their efforts toward overturning the financial-reform law enacted a year ago, and of leaking confidential information held by the commission, among other allegations.
"Although the purpose of the commission was to conduct in-depth fact-finding to determine the causes of the economic crisis, internal commission documents obtained by the committee include e-mails from a Republican Commissioner urging his colleagues to use their positions on the commission to help House Republicans in their efforts to repeal the Dodd-Frank Act," the report said.
The report referred to a Nov. 3 email from commission member Peter Wallison, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, to fellow GOP commissioner Douglas Holtz-Eakin, discussing the repeal efforts.
"It's very important, I think, that what we say in our separate statements not undermine the ability of the new House GOP to modify or repeal Dodd-Frank," Wallison wrote, according to the report.
The report was yet another sign of wrangling between the two parties over the crisis commission's work. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight Committee, had planned a hearing Wednesday with Phil Angelides, who had served as chairman of the crisis commission. Yet that hearing was cancelled. Last year, Issa similarly had alleged ethical lapses among Democratic members of the commission.
Other allegations in Cummings' report included that Wallison leaked confidential commission information to Ed Pinto, a former Fannie Mae official and an AEI fellow who shared Wallison's view that U.S. housing policy was a key cause of the crisis. The report also alleged contact between Bill Thomas, a former Republican congressman and a member of the commission, and a political consulting firm about the commission's work. (Thomas was not available for comment.)
In an interview, Wallison said he indeed shared a commission memo with Pinto, but it was because the commission had not given Pinto a chance to respond to its criticism of his views on housing finance.
"The point is there's a much bigger issue, and that is this data is important, and the fact that Pinto was not going to be given an opportunity to respond to a critique of his own data says something about the way the commission conducted its entire inquiry," Wallison said.
Asked whether he tried to use his position to aid a repeal of Dodd-Frank, Wallison said he has always believed the law should be repealed because it "reflected a wrong interpretation of what caused the financial crisis."
"Dodd-Frank should never have been the response to the financial crisis," he said. "It should have been a change in housing policy."
