Below The Beltway

It’s looking more and more obvious that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was lying when he said he didn’t know about the AIG bonuses payments that were made last Friday until March 10th.

Consider this video from a March 3rd Congressional hearing. The speaker is Democratic Congressman Peter Crowley:

Here’s the transcript:

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Welcome to the committee, Mr. Geithner, and thank you for your responses so far. It never ceases to amaze me the level of apparent amnesia some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have had about how we got to this problem in the first place, and I thank you for answering Mr. Heller’s question in particular. By the line of questioning, you’re almost led to believe that because of a last month and a few days of a presidency we had the problem we have today, and thank you for setting the record straight. This didn’t happen overnight. This took eight years in the making of stagnant, at best, growth.

But yesterday, Mr. Secretary, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve announced a new fourth plan to rescue troubled financial services giant AIG. I do agree that AIG’s sustainability is the lynchpin for some of our recovery efforts, and it’s important for the federal government to work to keep it afloat. However, I must demand that AIG increase the accountability and transparency, something that was not done during the previous administration.

For example, just last month, AIG paid 343 employees of AIG FP — their Financial Products division that created the financial hole that AIG is in, and in turn a multibillion-dollar bill for American taxpayers — $56 million in bonuses and are slated to pay an additional $162 million in bonuses to 393 participants in the coming weeks. And there’s more. Further bonus payments totaling approximately 230 million (dollars) are due to 407 participants at AIG’s Financial Products division in March 2010. This makes no sense to my constituency.

That was nine days before Geithner claimed he was told about the AIG bonuses at issue now:

Despite the interagency discussions in February about A.I.G.’s ill-starred bonus plan, as well as Mr. Geithner’s exchange on the matter in a hearing, Mr. Geithner continued to insist on Thursday that he had not really understood the magnitude of the bonuses until one week ago.

“I was informed by my staff of the full scale of these specific things on Tuesday, March 10,” Mr. Geithner said in an interview with CNN on Thursday. “As soon as I heard about the full scale of these things, we moved very actively to explore every possible avenue — legal avenue — to address this problem.”

That, of course, is inconsistent with the fact that Geithner was asked about these very bonuses a week earlier, and with the fact that his staff had asked that language regarding these balances be included in the stimulus bill back in February.

Clearly, he’s lying.

H/T: Hot Air