Destroyed Phone Coversations Prompt New Calls for Further Investigation into Countrywide’s VIP Loan Scandal

Although Democrat Senators Chris Dodd and Kent Conrad were cleared of violating any gift rule for accepting loan discounts in Countrywide’s VIP loan program, they were admonished at the time for being lax in how they handled the transactions, as it at minimum gave them the look of doing something wrong.

Even so, it has been shockingly found that Countrywide Financial Corp. had recorded the conversations they had with borrowers in the VIP loan program, but now have destroyed them, which has now generated new calls for further investigation of the highly controversial program from congressional leaders.

California lawmaker Darrell Issa has responded by attempting to subpoena those records which haven’t been destroyed in connection to the Countrywide VIP loan program, but for some unknown reason New York Democrat Rep. Edolphus Towns has rejected the request, which makes no sense at all. Does Towns know something we don’t know? Why would he reject it knowing it makes things even worse and more secretive than they were, and the actions of Countrywide even more suspect? This even makes it look more unethical than it did before, and the destruction of taped conversations concerning other potential ethic violations is cause for further investigation and access to the remaining tapes. I’m not sure if it was illegal to erase these tapes or not, but that will have to be investigated as well, along with those that knew what was on those tapes.

This does need to be investigated thoroughly, as the destruction of the tapes almost ensures there were a lot more things on them than anyone wanted to be found. The idea that politicians were involved with questionable activity in connection to the current banking crisis begs to be thoroughly explored in order for lawmakers to get to the bottom of it.

To me Democrats are extremely foolish to resist this, as it makes them look bad and that they may be covering up for some of their own, which may have went beyond just making bad decisions as to not handling themselves in a way that made them look like they did something unethical, to outright breaking of the law.

If everyone involved with the VIP loans are clean, why resist handing the tapes over to lawmakers in order to get everything out into the open. This doesn’t make sense the more the issue is pursued, and resisting efforts to be transparent only makes things worse rather than better, and will draw even more attention to the Countrywide VIP program then before.