Whistleblower: Pelosi Covered Up Role In Crisis
...In 2009, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed her California pal Phil Angelides, a long-time Democrat operative, to lead the commission. The fix seemed to be in, and Wallison's account of the inner workings of the 10-member body confirms it. Here's what took place during the FCIC's 18-month, $10 million probe:

• Angelides provided no staff to help Wallison and other Republicans interview witnesses, conduct research or draft the report. But commission Democrats were assigned almost 80 staffers to help formulate their single theory that bank risk-taking and greed unleashed by deregulation caused the crisis.

• Angelides never notified Wallison or other commissioners about the hundreds of witnesses he called to testify in closed-door interviews with his staff, denying them the chance to cross-examine the witnesses.

• Staffers failed to put these private witnesses under oath, even though the final report was based almost exclusively on their testimony with little or no documents or data to back up their statements, which simply validated the Democrat narrative.

• Angelides buried evidence revealing that by 2008, three in four high-risk mortgages wound up on the books of HUD-controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or agencies such as the Federal Housing Administration. A data-rich memo by former Fannie Mae chief credit officer Ed Pinto proved that government, not the private sector, drove risky lending. But Pinto's research "was never formally made available by the chair or staff to the other members of the FCIC," Wallison writes.

• Angelides withheld the final draft of the report from Wallison and other commissioners until eight days before sending it to the printer, never giving them the time they needed to go over the wording or content of the almost 900-page draft.