Calbuzz, a go-to site for the inside dope on California politics, has been covering the corrupt and checkered political career of Rep. Darrell Issa since it began 15 years ago. Now Calbuzz asks a simple question: “Why Isn’t Darrell Issa in Jail?”
[We] keep wondering why our colleagues in the Washington press corps have not figured out the truth about this guy: he’s a thug…
Issa is a wealthy bully and proven liar with a checkered personal history featuring criminal and civil legal proceedings that involve car thefts, concealed weapons charges and allegations of insurance arson, among his other sterling qualifications for high office. A reasonable man might imagine a less wealthy person perched in Stony Lonesome rather than on the dais of a prestigious and powerful congressional committee.
None of Issa’s past, um, indiscretions are a secret, at least since May 1998, when Lance Williams, then of the San Francisco Examiner, began reporting on the guy. Given that his shady past was admirably re-collated by Ryan Lizza in a 2011 New Yorker profile, Issa’s lies and prominent roles in a long train of extra-legal abuses should be well known to esteemed Washington press hounds who spend their days smooching his expensively draped derriere.
The Calbuzzers provide a “Cliff’s Notes” sampler of Issa’s misdeeds. Here are four items from the list, go read the rest.
- In 1971, he stole Jay Bergey’s yellow Dodge Charger which was found abandoned on a highway after Bergey confronted and threatened Issa. No charges were filed.
- On March 15, 1972, Ohio police arrested Issa and his older brother, William, and charged them with stealing a red Maserati from a Cleveland showroom. The judge eventually dismissed the case.
- While the Maserati case was pending, on December 1, 1972, two police officers on patrol in the small town of Adrian, Ohio, stopped Issa driving a yellow Volkswagen the wrong way down a one-way street and found a .25-calibre Colt automatic inside a box of ammunition, along with a “military pouch” that contained “44 rounds of ammo and a tear gas gun and two rounds of ammo for it.” Issa was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. Issa pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of possession of an unregistered gun. He paid a small fine and was sentenced to six months’ probation.
- At about 2:30 am, September 7, 1982, Issa’s Quantum and Steal Stopper office went up in flames. A fire-analysis report commissioned by the St. Paul insurance company, and dated October 19, 1982, a month after the incident, concluded that the fire was “incendiary.” The report cited “suspicious burn patterns,” such as “two separate major areas of origin,” and it said, “No accidental source of heating power was located at either of these two major areas of origin.” The manner in which stacks of cardboard boxes burned was inconsistent with an accidental fire. A flammable liquid appeared to have been poured over the boxes. The blue flames seen emanating from the roof were evidence, according to the investigators, of burning carbon monoxide that is produced when an accelerant like gasoline ignites. The black smoke was also a clue. “Such black smoke normally occurs in a fire only when a hydrocarbon is burning,” the report said. When investigators tested burn damage from inside the factory, they found “the same identical mixture of flammable hydrocarbons” in four samples taken from diverse locations.
On Sept 20, 1982, in an interview with an insurance investigator, Joey Adkins, the former owner of Steal Stopper, said Issa had removed the company’s Apple II computer from the building, including “all hardware, all software, all the instruction books,” and also “the discs for accounts payable, accounts receivable, customer list, everything.” According to Adkins, Issa also transferred a copy of every design used by Steal Stopper from a filing cabinet to a fireproof box. He also said that Issa put in the box some important silk screens used in the production of circuit boards. Insurance officials noted that, less than three weeks before the fire, Issa had increased his insurance from a hundred thousand dollars to four hundred and sixty-two thousand dollars. “Quite frankly,” Adkins told the investigator, “I feel the man set the fire.”
The Ohio state fire marshal never determined the cause of the fire and no one was ever charged with a crime. According to Issa, St. Paul paid Quantum twenty-five thousand dollars, but refused to pay his claim for the Steal Stopper inventory. Issa sued St. Paul for a hundred and seventy-five thousand.
As Calbuzz noted, the secret of Issa’s remarkable success is that he has cultivated a following of derriere-smoochers among the Beltway elite, a strategy similar to the deployed by John McCain in his rise from war hero to congressman to senator and, eventually, presidential candidate. Like McCain, Issa gives after-hours, off-the-record access, mostly in the form of socializing, in return for laudatory coverage of him, his issues and agenda. With Issa there is a stipulation, however. The unsavory acts in his past — charges of grand theft auto, arson and the rest — are strictly off limits.
But Darrell Issa is no John McCain. He may share McCain’s political cynicism and shameless hypocrisy, but Issa lacks McCain’s political instincts and, most of all, his smarts. Luckily for Issa, however, he has one thing going for him that trumps all his shortcomings: He represents one of the few absolutely safe Republican districts in California: CA 49 in northern San Diego County, which is adjacent to the U.S. Marine’s Camp Pendleton and includes beach and inland communities that are popular with active duty personnel and their families.
It is a seat that, barring unforeseen events, Darrell Issa can hold for life.
No offense, but the Washington press corps didn’t give the gift of Issa to the nation, the voters of California did, or as you point out, at least the majority of the ones in Dist. 49. In a GOP/Tea House guys like Issa are the rock stars, and unfortunately it would make the press seem to be running a vendetta if they focused more on Issa’s past, which the voters chose to ignore, than on his performance today. I guess that’s where sites like this come in, and hope those who don’t know his past will read your post and spread the word.
I didn’t suggest the reporters were responsible for electing Issa. What I said — or what CalBuzz said and I repeated — is that a small coterie of Beltway reporters has given Issa a much higher profile than most of his colleagues and a prominent voice way bigger than he deserves or has earned. His relationship with this passel of reporters is analogous to that of remora eels that swim along symbiotically with sharks. In Issa’s case, the remoras and the shark have drinks after hours and the shark shares stuff with them that is strictly off the record and then doles out quotable quotes on the record that they can then report “exclusively.” In return, the remoras burnish the shark’s image and ignore inconvenient aspects of his past like, say, charges of insurance arson and grand theft auto.
This is exactly how John McCain got to be John McCain. Remember how shocked, SHOCKED, I tells ya, the Beltway was when McCain went hard right and nasty in the ’08 campaign? That was partly because he’d spent years pretending to be a reasonable fellow as he cultivated them with his booze and bonhomie (see for instance: A free ride for the Straight Talk Express in Salon.com). What these reporters failed to understand about McCain — because they were naifs? — was that he would do and/or say anything that needed saying or doing in order to get elected.
Issa has gotten as far as he has by following McCain’s playbook. Without his remoras, he’d be just another sad shark glub-glubbing on the back bench in the House. He’s not friends with Cantor or Boehner. In fact, it appears that Issa has no friends or strong allies in the House at all. And no other House member that I’m aware of has this sort of symbiotic setup with reporters — not Cantor and certainly not Boehner.
His past encounters with the law should be part of his record, but his remoras simply pretend they don’t exist. As a corollary, imagine the press covering Anthony Weiner’s mayoral run but deliberately not mentioning the fact that he exposed his naughty bits on the Internet.
In California statewide, Issa’s “brand” is his shady past, pretty much. And among folks who follow politics, he’s best remembered for losing the 1998 GOP primary for Barbara Boxer’s Senate seat to Matt Fong who went on to lose to Boxer by double digits. A few years later, Issa paid several million bucks to a handful of slick GOP operatives to engineer the recall of Gov. Gray Davis so that Issa himself could become governor. Using Issa’s money, the operatives delivered a sufficient number of signatures on petitions to put the recall on the ballot (back then, signature gatherers were paid a bounty of $1 per signature) but then Schwarzenegger stepped in and “stole” the race from Issa.
It was then, in 2003, at the moment that Schwarzenegger stepped in that Californians who don’t usually follow politics — as well as people all over the world — suddenly became engaged in the California Recall. Most Californians had never heard of Issa until then. Their first impression of him was when, with cameras rolling from news outlets around the world, he broke down into inconsolable sobs.
For that reason and others, Issa has no chance, zero percent, of ever being elected to statewide office or to the Senate in California. (His only chance to move up to the Senate is to pull a Liz Cheney/Wyoming move and run for Senate from Ohio, the state where he grew up.) With nowhere else to go, he’ll be there in the House until he retires.
There have been rumblings lately, however, that the remoras are upset with him because so much of what he has been feeding them — Fast & Furious, Benghazi and the IRS — has turned out to be bullshit. But if Darrell Issa has not been discredited in the eyes of the media by now, the odds are better than even he never will be.
I also want to know why this man is not in jail, the tape is out on operation groundswell, he and Boehner, along with Ginny Thomas, Alan West have been plotting to manufacture scandals (one being Benghazi) to bring down the government. I want to know if this is a criminal act, I feel it should be. Would be interested if anyone could bring this up.