No one asks Wallison about his lies to Congress.
Peter Wallison's lies are old news. They were hiding in plain sight on January 27, 2011, when his dissent to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report was published. They were first reported here, in Daily Kos, on April 15. So when a new report, released yesterday, disclosed even more deceitful and unethical activities by Republican members of the FCIC, Wallison was contacted by reporters, who never asked him to account for his lies.
This failure can be traced to the reluctance, on the part of Democratic staffers who prepared the new report, to tell the complete truth. They wrote: "Wallison Inaccurately Claimed Commission Ignored AEI Position." That's like saying, "So-and-so inaccurately claimed that Obama was born in Kenya."
Wallison leaked a confidential internal memo to his colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Edward Pinto. The staff memo, which had been distributed to all FCIC members, debunked Pinto's crackpot claim that government housing goals created 27 million subprime, Alt-A and otherwise "high risk" mortgages. Wallison told Bloomberg that the leak was justifiable, because Pinto should have had the opportunity to respond. As for the Democratic report, “I wear it as a badge of honor.”
It's a new level of chutzpah that Bloomberg seems to overlook. The entire premise of Wallison's dissent was this pack of lies:
Any objective investigation of the causes of the financial crisis would have looked carefully at [Pinto's] research, exposed it to the members of the Commission, taken Pinto’s testimony, and tested the accuracy of Pinto’s research. But the Commission took none of these steps. Pinto’s research was never made available to the other members of the FCIC, or even to the commissioners who were members of the subcommittee charged with considering the role of housing policy in the financial crisis.
Not only was Pinto's research disseminated to members of the FCIC, Wallison leaked the staff analysis to Pinto, told other members about it, and then says he's proud of what he did. How stupid does Wallison think we are? (Answer: Very.) But since Bloomberg fails to report Wallison's lies about the FCIC ignoring Pinto's research, his "badge of honor," maintains a veneer of plausibility.
Seven months ago, Wallison trashed the reporting of HuffPo's Shahien Nasiripour. "Only in the fever-swamps of the left could anyone believe that the Republicans on the FCIC sought to 'ban' the words 'Wall Street,' 'shadow banking,' 'interconnection,' and 'deregulation' from the commission's report," wrote Wallison shortly after Nasiripour reported the story based on two well placed sources, including the on-the-record confirmation by FCIC member Brooksley Born. As it happened, the GOP "Primer," on the financial crisis banished the words, "Wall Street," "shadow banking," "interconnection," and "deregulation."
Yet Nasiripour gives Wallison fairly gentle treatment:
"I get this memo criticizing Pinto's data -- what was I supposed to do?" Wallison said. "Pinto should be the one to respond to criticism of his data."
Pinto said Wallison sent him the FCIC memo with a simple question: "What do you think?"
In the context of the story, it all sounds like an honest misunderstanding, because, again, the lies in Wallison's dissent are not mentioned.
And no one asked Wallison how he could write with a straight face in his dissent that, "there is no evidence that the 'interconnections' among financial institutions alleged to have caused the crisis were significantly enhanced by CDS or derivatives generally... [and] no significant deregulation of financial institutions occurred in the last 30 years..."
If we really want to get at the truth, we need to call out lies for what they are.