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View Full Version : Sen Bunning: Bernanke is hiding a smoking gun!




itshappening
01-26-2010, 09:26 PM
Oh my god, this is seriously bad, it should lead to investigations and indictments.

Call your senators and congressmen

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A Republican senator said Tuesday that documents showing Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernake covered up the fact that his staff recommended he not bailout AIG are being kept from the public. And a House Republican charged that a whistleblower had alerted Congress to specific documents provide "troubling details" of Bernanke's role in the AIG bailout.

Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.), a Bernanke critic, said on CNBC that he has seen documents showing that Bernanke overruled such a recommendation. If that's the case, it raises questions about whether bailing out AIG was actually necessary, and what Bernanke's motives were.

A letter Bunning sent Monday to Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) also refers to an "[e]mail exchange regarding restructuring of assistance to AIG, initiated by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner" in March 2009.

Senators will be voting on Bernanke's confirmation for a second term in the coming days. But only senators on the Banking Committee have had access to documents that illuminate just what decisions he made and how he made them. And that access only came after Bunning publicly complained that Dodd and Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) were the only members of the committee could see them.

Meanwhile, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who has been investigating the AIG bailout in his role as ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said that a whistleblower has informed him of "troubling details" of Bernanke's role in the bailout.

There may be nothing incriminating in the documents, but without access to them, the Senate will be voting to confirm him in the dark.

Senators from both parties who say they will vote to confirm Bernanke credit him with deft actions that averted a second Great Depression. Those actions, they argue, outweigh what blame he deserves for causing the crisis in the first place.

"He's done a very good job in the last year. And but for his work, we would be in a very different position in this country today," said Dodd Monday. "Now that's hard to prove a negative. But the fact of the matter is, our entire financial system might have collapsed but for his leadership."

On Monday, Bunning sent a letter to Dodd, asking him to subpoena the emails and other documents. Bunning and other committee members have thus far had to view the documents at the Federal Reserve and are bound by confidentiality from revealing their contents. "He thinks that all members of the Senate should have access to the documents he's seen," said Bunning spokesman Mike Reynard.

Issa, in a letter to his committee's chairman, Ed Towns (D-N.Y.), asked for a similar subpoena and even specified exactly which documents he wants: Those tagged electronically as "sb-aig-01000092 to sb-aig-010000125" and "Draft Memo on AIG.pdf."

Towns spokeswoman Jenny Rosenberg said that Towns would decide on a subpoena after Wednesday's hearing on the AIG bailout.

Bunning, in his letter to Dodd, is equally specific, citing nine particular documents that the Senate should review before voting to confirm Bernanke:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/26/is-bernanke-hiding-a-smok_n_437509.html