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Cummings and Issa Clash At First Oversight Committee Hearing (VIDEO)

Ryan J. Reilly | January 26, 2011, 11:30AM

Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Ranking Member Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) clashed over opening statements at the first hearing of the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday.

Both sides say Issa told Cummings 30 minutes before today's hearing that there would be no opening statements issued at the hearing, which focused on government oversight over money distributed under the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP).

Spokesman Kurt Bardella told TPM that Issa killed the idea of opening statements in order to skip the "political speechifying" which ate up time. "The American people wants Congress to listen more and talk less," Bardella said.

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Topics: Darrell Issa, House Oversight, elijah cummings

Darrell Issa

Cummings: We'll Stop Any Issa 'Witchhunts' (VIDEO)

Ryan J. Reilly | January 5, 2011, 3:40PM

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD)

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) -- the man Democrats chose to go toe-to-toe with incoming House Oversight Committee Chair Darrell Issa (R-CA) -- is making the rounds on cable news and showing off the aggressive style that helped him win the spot.

Cummings said that he expects to see the tougher version of Issa -- in other words, not the Issa who walked back his harshest statements and said he wanted to work with the administration -- and said his staff is ready for an "avalanche of subpoenas coming out and all kinds of inquires" similar to what happened during the Clinton administration.

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Topics: Darrell Issa, House Oversight, House Oversight and Government Reform, elijah cummings

Wall Street

The TARP Email Trail: AIG And Citi Execs Clueless And Arrogant, Kashkari "Tough To Watch"

Moe Tkacik | March 27, 2009, 3:48PM

Following a few months of courtroom wrangling, Fox Business News has obtained a much-redacted 10,096 pages of Treasury Department documents on the bank bailout. Scrubbed of "proprietary" information and what would presumably be their most explosive revelations, the communiques exchanged between the Bush Administration and executives at Citigroup and AIG read something like "Dumb and Dumber and I Know It Seems Impossible But Even Dumber Than That." The first role would be played by the TARP overseer and cheerleader for the Italian automobile industry Neel Kashkari, whose aides nervously emailed one another as they watched him testify before the House Financial Services Committee on what exactly he was doing with their money.

Nason: How's it going?

Zuccarelli: Bad. Serious questions, too, not "chump" type questions. They're going to start to break Neel down soon, I'm getting worried he's going to start snapping.

Nason: This AIG stuff is tough to watch.

Zuccarelli: They killed him on exec comp. He didn't know answer.

But we wouldn't know how to answer, either, if we'd written the law that appropriated the trillion or so taxpayer dollars that paid bonuses to the clueless executives at AIG and Citigroup: