Transcript: Rep. Darrell Issa on State of the Union with Candy Crowley
Today on CNN’s State of the Union with Candy Crowley, Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, incoming chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, appeared on the program. Senior White House correspondent Ed Henry guest anchored today’s program. A full transcript follows.
MANDATORY CREDIT: CNN’s “State of the Union”
THIS IS A RUSH FDCH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
HENRY: Chairman Dan Burton issued over 1,000 subpoenas and launched a flurry of investigations directed at President Clinton with very mixed results. When we come back, incoming Chairman Darrell Issa, and he’ll tell us his approach.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HENRY: And joining me here in Washington, Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, incoming chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Welcome and happy New Year.
ISSA: Happy New Year.
HENRY: Now I wonder, you’ve been wanting this gavel for a long time, you’re about to get it, what are you going to do with it?
ISSA: Well, I’m going to try to make a real difference in Washington’s spending patterns. You know, it doesn’t take a genius in the private sector to know that you can save literally hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending if you can make it more responsive. That’s the main job. That’s really what we do in oversight is look at the mechanisms of government, see if they’re working, and if they’re not working, ensure that the executive branch fix them.
HENRY: But are you going to have specific hearings laid out January, February? Do you have a plan already?
ISSA: Oh, obviously. In the last Congress, Chairman Towns and I did FDA oversight. We’re going to continue that. There is more work to be done on food and drug safety, those kinds of items which the American people care about perennially.
We’re going to start into the whole question of Medicare. Here you have $100 billion of waste. You know, “Obama-care,” for all of it what it wanted to do, it didn’t touch the fact that basically they pay to non-existent entities in the tens of billions of dollars every year. That has got to be changed.
HENRY: Now I notice you just used the word “Obama-care,” that’s not exactly a non-partisan look at what the health care reform is. That’s what partisans call it when they want to attack it. They call it “Obama-care.”
ISSA: And in all fairness, people always call everything “reform” when they want you to think it’s reform. The health care bill clearly, when it became law, was about expanding Medicaid mandates that have been at least tentatively ruled unconstitutional, and a big growth in government, and the reform was extremely light or nonexistent.
So as Republicans, our goal is to repeal what was done on a partisan basis, come back and do on a bipartisan basis real reform, and my committee, which has the dominant amount of oversight historically needs to make the case for where that waste, fraud and abuse is, where government is part of the problem, where government can be part of the solution.
HENRY: I’ve been reading a lot of the profiles the big newspapers as you get ready to take the gavel and you’ve been talking about bipartisanship, working with Democrats on your panel. But that’s not the approach you took — right before the election, you went on Rush Limbaugh’s radio program. Let’s listen to that.
(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)
ISSA: It’s going to be acrimonious. There’s no question. He has been one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times.
(END AUDIO CLIP)
HENRY: You have since said you regret saying that.
(CROSSTALK)
ISSA: I corrected — what I meant to say — you know, on live radio, with Rush going back and forth — and by the way that was because Rush had me on to answer the question of — about coming together, having compromise. He didn’t like the compromise word, when I said we’re going to agree to disagree and then we’re going to find a kind of common ground, the kind of compromise that makes — and gets things done.
In saying that this is one of the most corrupt administrations, which is what I meant to say there, when you hand out $1 trillion in TARP just before this president came in, most of it unspent, $1 trillion nearly in stimulus that this president asked for, plus this huge expansion in health care and government, it has a corrupting effect.
When I look at waste, fraud and abuse in the bureaucracy and in the government, this is like steroids to pump up the muscles of waste.
HENRY: But first of all, on TARP, that was before the Obama administration. That was pushed through by the Bush administration, not — so how could you call the Obama administration one of the most corrupt ever if the Bush administration pushed TARP through?
ISSA: I was — I wasn’t talking about TARP legislation. What I said…
HENRY: But you said now that that’s what you meant.
ISSA: What I said was the administration got this money. That money sent trillions of dollars of extra money that were basically used like presidential earmarks, handing them out, deciding what to do with General Motors and Chrysler, who lives, who dies, what union gets the benefit.
All of that would not have been possible if Congress had done its job, if we’d said, Mr. President, in the case of President Bush, what is it you need; tell us blow by blow, dollar by dollar, and we will give you the money on a case by case basis.
Instead what happened is we gave President Bush, and President Obama inherited $80 billion worth of walking-around money with no guidelines so that what was supposed to help financial institutions ultimately bailed out car manufacturers.
HENRY: OK, but specifically you also went — went after President Obama in the Joe Sestak case in Pennsylvania and called it “Obama’s Watergate,” and you said it was an impeachable offense. So I know you’re — you seem to be backpedaling now and saying you’re not going after him.
ISSA: Ed, just so you understand…
HENRY: But why did you call…
(CROSSTALK)
ISSA: Just so you understand, you’re misquoting. And it’s very important that we get it right here.
HENRY: No, we found the quotes, and you…
ISSA: What you’ll find is…
(CROSSTALK)
HENRY: In an e-mail, you said…
ISSA: I quoted Dick Morris…
HENRY: Right, that’s who said…
(CROSSTALK)
ISSA: … who had said it was an impeachable event. OK…
HENRY: And an e-mail you put out said it was Obama’s Watergate.
ISSA: OK, so let’s not — let’s not compare the two.
HENRY: Well, but Watergate was impeachable offenses.
(CROSSTALK)
ISSA: Ed — Ed, I came on your show, but don’t create a statement which has to be answered…
(CROSSTALK)
HENRY: … Obama’s Watergate. It’s not a creation.
ISSA: It is in fact an example of misconduct, in my opinion. Now, what happened throughout this process — and I’ve made this very clear — is we’ve discovered the problem’s bigger than that. It’s bigger than President Obama.
President Bush’s people said we did the same thing. Guess what? It was a criminal event under the law — a Criminal event, when President Bush’s people did it, and I don’t know when they did it. They’ve just admitted that they did it, when president — well…
HENRY: In terms of trying get a candidate out of a race…
(CROSSTALK)
ISSA: When you offer a position, paid or unpaid, existing statute makes it illegal to offer that job in return for affecting an election. That is — that is something we’ve got to get to stop. The American people do not want ambassadorships or any other position handed out to save a party money.
HENRY: So do you still believe it was Obama’s Watergate, the Joe Sestak case?
ISSA: Once we knew, as we discovered, that it turns out that Republicans and previous administrations thought it was OK in spite of the absolute black and white letter of the law, it got bigger — it got bigger than President Obama.
HENRY: So are you going to investigate the Joe Sestak case?
ISSA: No we’re not. Here’s the whole point.
HENRY: But if it was Obama’s Watergate, now you’re going to walk away?
ISSA: Ed, what we know now is we know that there is a problem in government that executive branch people think it’s OK to do this. It’s not OK.
Do we need to get this administration to stop doing it? Do we need, if anything, to find out who it was in the Bush administration that thought it was OK to use your taxpayer dollars to affect a Republican primary?
That’s — it was wrong if it was done in the Bush administration. It’s wrong in the Obama administration. But remember, the focus of our committee has always been, and you look at all the work I’ve done over the last four years on the oversight committee; it has been consistently about looking for waste, fraud and abuse. That’s the vast majority of what we do.
HENRY: Well, let’s — Congressman Boehner, who is going to be the speaker, has said he wants to cut $100 billion from the federal budget and he wants to start with committees.
How are you going to fund all these various investigations when Democrats point out that you had the Securities and Exchange Commission investigate the timing of the — of its suit against Goldman Sachs some time ago because there was a suggestion that you had that maybe the Democrats were timing that suit so that it would help them pass financial reform legislation?
Basically the SEC inspector general went through 3.4 million e- mails from 64 employees. They took all kinds of sworn statements. They spent weeks and weeks on this. And at the end there was nothing there.
How much did an investigation like that cost and are you going to be transparent about how much taxpayer money you’re spending on all of this?
ISSA: Ed, I’m glad you asked this because what we did was we noted the timing. We sent to the SEC — and the inspector general there said yes, this looks like the kind of thing that we follow up and investigate.
He conducted an investigation, with no interference and no guidance from us. He did what he thought was right and he reported out his findings. When his findings came out and said, yes, it’s a coincidence; it’s not any corrupt behavior, we never said or did another thing. That’s government doing what it’s supposed to do.
HENRY: But they went through 3.4 million e-mails and found nothing. It cost a lot of money, didn’t it?
ISSA: First of all, they have the tools in government to go through 3.4 e-mails in a matter of hours on a keyword search, the same as you go through trillions of things when you do a Google search.
So let’s understand. The I.G. has a budget; he lived within his budget; he did his investigation the way he thought he should do with no interference from Congress, only a letter saying we think you should consider looking at that.
They agreed — they actually agreed and expanded their investigation, but they did it without any interference. It was the Obama administration, because these people are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate — the Obama administration investigating itself and coming up with a legitimate finding that there was no wrongdoing in spite of the way it looked. That’s government doing its job properly.
HENRY: OK, I want to fact-check something you said in this morning’s Los Angeles Times. You said, and we told this…
ISSA: I must have gotten up really early.
(LAUGHTER)
HENRY: Well, you said, “After a trillion-dollar stimulus that didn’t create jobs, a trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street and a trillion-dollar health care overhaul, the American people believed we need more oversight, not less.”
On that first part, a trillion-dollar stimulus that did not create jobs, you say. Bloomberg has a story out also saying “Employment probably rose for a third month in December, bringing U.S. payroll growth last year to $1 million and pointing to further improvement in the labor market for 2011, economists said before a report this week.”
How can you make the case that no jobs have been created?
Maybe the White House didn’t create as many as they advertised, no doubt about it, but how can you make the case that they’ve created no jobs with the stimulus? And you’re about to investigate this.
ISSA: First of all, unemployment rose. By hearings held under a Democratic chairman, we were told under sworn testimony, with Chairman Towns sitting next to me, that it cost, just to keep a teacher on the salary one more year, $174,000 each.
Now, you can say those are jobs created or saved. Really, they’re simply dollars spent for one year of kicking the can down the road. It didn’t create — there’s not a lot of ripple effect in that kind of spending.
Real creation of jobs, permanent jobs is what we didn’t get out of this. Of course, you get your money spent. If I hire you and give you a quarter million dollars or $174,000, you have a job for that year. That’s not creating a job. That’s hiring or continuing to pay for a government worker.
Creating a job is about something you do that becomes permanent. Stimulus should have been about private-sector creation.
And you know what, Ed, when you say no, it’s a net business — when you look and say, where there’s some absolute jobs created? Of course. Those contracts let for what the president now discovers is not shovel-ready because there’s no such thing as shovel-ready when you have years of bureaucracy to move something, but those jobs were real jobs, in the private sector, on behalf of government projects.
When you look at the effects of the stimulus, we spend $1 trillion. We didn’t have net growth, and we didn’t have net growth because we didn’t spend it right. And more importantly, we didn’t make the kinds of investment we need to make.
We could have used that same trillion dollars to tell industry you make the investments that make sense, you hire the people, we’ll give you a helping hand and some sort of an abatement, but if you don’t create the jobs, and if they’re not permanent jobs, we’re not giving you the money.
HENRY: Very last question, are you — what kind of cooperation are you expecting from the Obama administration? And if they don’t cooperate, and I stress, if they don’t cooperate in some of your investigations, are you willing to press criminal contempt of Congress charges?
ISSA: Ed, as soon as I got this job I got a call from Vice President Biden. We had a 45-minute or so meeting, and it was a wonderful meeting because he cares about the same things I care about. He cares about the dollar going further. He has a huge government that needs help.
I’ve got IGs, the General Accounting Office, I’ve got all of government, including all of them that report to the president, I’ve got them wanting to do the same thing. I just have to help them do it.
Earl Devaney, with stimulus money — and I note this all the time, with stimulus money, did some forensic work that has already shown that we can find far more waste and fraud than we ever did before.
Now that’s one of the good things that came out of stimulus is an IG who was temporarily put in as a chairman here, has looked and said, I can do a better job, it’s the first time I’ve been given the kind of money for me to do this forensic work.
We could save tens of billions of dollars next year alone if we took the technology that he did for a song, a couple of million bucks total, and went after it. Imagine spending a few million to save tens of billions in fraud. That’s what we need to do.
President Obama has the same goal I have. Now he may want to re- spend the money somewhere else. I want the money not to be spent at all. But let’s first find the fraud and then we can decide how to not spend the money.
HENRY: Congressman Darrell Issa, we appreciate your time this morning.
ISSA: Thank you, Ed.
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