Yesterday, however, all his mudslinging appears to have been paid back in kind. San Diego’s CityBeat released an analysis of the local congressman’s 2010 financial disclosure statements and concluded that the investigators on Issa’s oversight committee “may want to start with Issa himself”:

Last summer, Issa went on a property-buying spree. In the span of two months, he bought industrial complexes in Oceanside and Carlsbad and a condo overlooking Oceanside Bay. Even his son picked up a home in Vista.

The Carlsbad complex, however, is at the center of a lawsuit playing out in Los Angeles County Superior Court. A bank lender in Ventura County is accusing a bank of selling Issa the building for at least $3 million less than it should have. [...]

The main lender, East West Bank, put the property up for auction but decided not to sell, instead filing a $12-million “credit bid” to hang onto it. Two weeks later, the bank sold the property to Issa’s company, DEI LLC, for $8.5 million.

In the complaint, Ventura County Business Bank—a secondary lender with an 8.3-percent interest in the original loan—accuses East West of negligence and “breach of implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing.” The complaint alleges that East West did not properly market the property and that the bank declined offers to buy the property and loan that were “significantly in excess” of what Issa paid. It specifically states that East West “discouraged” a potential buyer from making an $11.5-million bid on the property, which could have resulted in a $3-million discount for Issa.

There’s no indication, at this point, that any sort of quid pro quo took place, nor is Issa mentioned directly in the suit. But a three million dollar windfall for a congressman does seem like the sort of scandal in which Issa would usually take a keen interest.

In addition, CityBeat goes on to detail Issa’s extensive investments in Goldman Sachs’ High Yield Fund and a potential conflict of interest that may have occurred when he launched an investigation against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the timing of their fraud lawsuit against Goldman.

“The Goldman Sachs thing is the most troubling,” Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington’s Melanie Sloan told CityBeat. “That he recently invested money with Goldman Sachs and then is making statements protective of Goldman Sachs suggests his views may be informed more by his own financial holdings than Goldman Sachs’ actions.”

As of 2008, Issa was the wealthiest member of Congress.

From a press release sent along by the Office of National Drug Control Policy:

National Drug Control Policy Director Gil Kerlikowske said today “a new direction in drug policy” is required to reduce the strain on the Nation’s economy caused by drug abuse and to improve the public health and safety of our citizens.

Testifying before the Subcommittee on Domestic Policy of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Director Kerlikowske outlined national drug control priorities and the Fiscal Year 2011 National Drug Control Budget, noting that the Obama Administration approach to drug policy is “grounded in common sense, sound science, and practical experience.”

With drug use accounting for tens of billions of dollars per year in healthcare costs, and drug overdoses ranking second only to motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of accidental death, the Nation “needs to discard the idea that enforcement alone can eliminate our Nation’s drug problem,” Director Kerlikowske said. “Only through a comprehensive and balanced approach – combining tough, but fair, enforcement with robust prevention and treatment efforts – will we be successful in stemming both the demand for and supply of illegal drugs in our country.

“The forthcoming National Drug Control Strategy calls for addressing our Nation’s enormous demand for drugs by scaling up our public health policy response, integrating treatment programs into mainstream medicine, and recognizing that effective drug policy requires engagement at the community level,” Director Kerlikowske said.

He also noted that ONDCP would continue to work to “break down the silos between the prevention, treatment, and law enforcement communities– and the greatest use must be made of the finite resources at our disposal.”

The President’s $15.5 billion Fiscal Year 2011 National Drug Control Budget lays the foundation for these efforts and provides resources for five major drug control functions: substance abuse prevention; substance abuse treatment, domestic law enforcement, interdiction, and international support. The budget request specifically calls for an increase of $521.1 million over the FY 2010 enacted level, and includes a 6.5 percent increase for prevention and treatment; an increase of $73.8 million for Federal interdiction efforts; and an increase of $20.1 million for international support.

Well, not quite.

The watchdog overseeing the Wall Street bailout issued a report this week revealing that the program — dubbed the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) – is falling far short of its target. Instead of 3 to 4 million, the HAMP is on track to help between 1.5 and 2 million homeowners, according to the report conducted by the office of Neil Barofsky, special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

In their defense, Treasury officials have adopted a curious argument: They say that the HAMP was never designed to help 3 to 4 million homeowners, but simply to offer trial modifications to “up to” that many families. So while hundreds of thousands of homeowners continue to suffer foreclosures each month, the debate in Washington has become a war of words.

Testifying before a House committee last month, Phyllis Caldwell, who heads the HAMP, was quick to point out that nearly 1 million homeowners are currently in trial modifications.

“There are clear signs that our efforts are having a substantial impact,” Caldwell said.

But Barofsky notes that simply offering trial mods is hardly the same thing as providing actual help — that is, if the ultimate goal is to prevent foreclosures and stabilize the housing market.

“Measuring trial modification offers, or even actual trial modifications, for that matter, is simply not particularly meaningful,” the report states. “The goal that should be developed and tracked is how many people are helped to avoid foreclosure and stay in their homes through permanent modifications.”

As of last month, roughly 116,000 mortgage mods under the HAMP had been made permanent. Meanwhile, nearly 3 million homes went into foreclosure in 2009 alone.

Housing advocates have a pretty good idea why the HAMP hasn’t been as effective as it might have been: It relies on the voluntary efforts of mortgage servicers, who often find it more profitable to foreclose on homes than make the terms more affordable to homeowners. Advocates are pushing Congress and the White House to adopt a program that would force companies to reduce principal balances. So far, though, that plan has fallen on deaf ears on Capitol Hill.

Barofsky will be testifying on his HAMP report tomorrow before the House Oversight and Government Reform Office. Expect lawmakers to be unhappy with the HAMP’s progress.

Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Oversight panel, just announced a March 25 hearing to appraise Obama’s anti-foreclosure efforts, particularly the Home Affordable Modification Program. That initiative was sold as a way to help 3 to 4 million struggling homeowners by offering lenders financial incentives to modify mortgages voluntarily. As of last month, only 116,000 permanent mods had been finalized — a number that’s left lawmakers on both sides of the aisle unhappy with HAMP’s progress.

Next week, they’ll have even more data to scrutinize. Neil Barofsky, lead watchdog over the Troubled Asset Relief Program, is scheduled will release his report on HAMP management.

Other witnesses will include Herbert Allison, Jr., the Treasury’s assistant secretary for financial stability, and Gene Dodaro, who heads the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

The reasons behind the gathering are clear: While Wall Street is back to sipping champagne (literally), more than 308,000 homeowners suffered foreclosure last month alone, up 6 percent from the year before, according to RealtyTrac.

Panel Chairman Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) issued the formal invite earlier today. The news that Geithner will accept came through an anonymous congressional aide, according to The Hill.

The hearing is scheduled for Jan. 27.

Among the issues you should be prepared to address are the following:

• The Federal intervention at AIG, including your role in that intervention.
• The decision to compensate AIG’s credit default counterparties at par.
• The role of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and other Federal agencies in AIG’s failure to disclose to the public the counterparty payments.

There are, of course, other questions to ask. Like why the New York Fed is now lying about its role in trying to shield the payments from the public. And why the lawyer chosen to steer the AIG bailout was plucked from the team representing JPMorgan Chase.

Towns’ letter takes all the wind out of the argument, floated yesterday by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), that targeting Geithner — but not the Bush-era Treasury officials also involved – amounts to a Republican-driven witch hunt against the Obama administration.

The oversight hearing is scheduled for Jan. 27.

“The Federal Reserve has directed us not to provide you with the documents that it has provided to us, and that it will instead respond to your request directly,” Barofsky wrote in the Jan. 12 letter. “While we regret the Federal Reserve’s position in this matter, production of the requested documents absent the consent of the Federal Reserve in these circumstances could severely limit our ability to receive documentation from the Federal Reserve and other agencies in the future.”

The Fed’s relationship with AIG has been under a microscope since last week, when Bloomberg News reported that more than $60 billion in federal bailout funds intended for the beleaguered AIG were diverted instead to other Wall Street giants. The revelation that Fed officials then urged AIG not to disclose those payments has caused a storm on Capitol Hill, where a number of lawmakers — including Issa, the senior Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee — want an explanation for the Fed’s shielding of those “backdoor bailouts.”

Barofsky’s recent letter indicates that lawmakers might not get all the information they’re after — but probably also explains why Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.), chairman of the oversight panel, subpoenaed the Fed for those documents yesterday. Towns plans to hold a hearing on the AIG scandal next week.

The New York Fed has been under close scrutiny since last week, when it was revealed that the agency had asked AIG not to disclose payments it was making to other Wall Street giants after AIG had accepted tens of billions of dollars in federal bailout cash. Fed officials have argued that the decision to hide the payments was entirely in the hands of AIG lawyers. Yet internal emails show that those same lawyers wanted to report the transactions.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was head of the Fed at the time.

The new subpoenas, Towns said in a statement Tuesday, ”will provide the Committee with documents that will shed light on how and why taxpayer dollars were used for a backdoor bailout.”

The hearing, for which Towns has asked Geithner to testify, is expected sometime next week.

“More than one year after the first Federal bailout of AIG, the American people continue to question where their tax dollars were really sent when the government rescued this company,” Towns said Friday in a statement.

Geithner was head of the New York Fed when that agency advised AIG not to disclose tens of billions of dollars in payments to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street giants in late 2008, even after the government had stepped in with $180 billion for AIG. The saga has caused some lawmakers to accuse Fed officials of staging a “backdoor bailout” to Wall Street’s major players through AIG.

The hearing is tentatively scheduled for the week of Jan. 18. As we mentioned earlier, there are others who should get an invite to testify as well.

But yesterday the Obama administration was pulled more deeply into the scandal as well, after newly unveiled BoA documents suggested that both incoming Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and incoming senior economic adviser Larry Summers had endorsed the merger as well. From The Washington Post:

Bank of America chief executive Kenneth D. Lewis told the company’s board that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told him “that Geithner and, in addition, Larry Summers, were both on board with the transaction,” according to Dec. 22 talking points prepared for a conference call.

Both the White House and the Treasury Department have denied that Geithner and Summers were influential in pushing the merger, even if they knew about it, the Post reported. But their involvement at any level might explain why the Obama administration’s Securities Exchange Commission was so light in penalizing BoA for a failure to tell its shareholders about $3.6 billion in bonuses Merrill was poised to pay its employees around the time of the merger. The $33 million SEC fine — which effectively charged company shareholders for the alleged crimes of company executives — was thrown out by a federal judge last month.  According to U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, “The notion that Bank of America shareholders, having been lied to blatantly in connection with the multibillion-dollar purchase of a huge, nearly bankrupt company, need to lose another $33 million of their money . . . is absurd.” Rakoff has ordered a trial to be held in February.

The saga hasn’t been lost on some lawmakers. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has undertaken an extensive investigation into the details of the dubious merger — including those surrounding the decision to hide Merrill’s bonus payments from BoA shareholders. The committee will hold its fourth hearing on the episode this Thursday. Witnesses will include SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro, former SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, and Sheila Bair, head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.