In May of 1998, Lance Williams, of the San Francisco Examiner, reported that [Republican representative Darrell] Issa had not always received the “highest possible” ratings in the Army. In fact, at one point he “received unsatisfactory conduct and efficiency ratings and was transferred to a supply depot.” Williams also discovered that Issa didn’t provide security for Nixon at the 1971 World Series, because Nixon didn’t attend any of the games.
A member of Issa’s Army unit, Jay Bergey, told Williams that his most vivid recollection of the young Issa was that in December, 1971, Issa stole his car, a yellow Dodge Charger. “I confronted Issa,” Bergey said in 1998. “I got in his face and threatened to kill him, and magically my car reappeared the next day, abandoned on the turnpike.”
Car theft seems to have been one of Darrell Issa's seriously favorite activities. Once he stole a red Maserati right out of a showroom. Then there was a red Mercedes. He smashed up a truck and injured a woman in another car. He blamed a lot of this on his brother...
From cars to alleged involvement arson from which Issa profited, having upped his insurance coverage shortly before a building burned down one night. Ryan Lizza has all the details of Issa's past history in his wonderfully dreadful profile of the Republican committee chair in the latest New Yorker. It seems Issa has begun to cool his talk about investigating the Obama administration. Lizza's article may add to recent concerns.
Maybe Issa is catching on to how vulnerable he is personally. On the other hand, Issa is a very bright guy who can be phenomenally stupid. One of his targets is climate change.
It’s easy to imagine, however, that some of Issa’s investigations could end up as acrimonious party struggles, if only because Republicans and Democrats now seem to deal with different sets of facts. Issa seems unconvinced about the science behind climate change, and the investigation that he seemed most passionate about when we spoke involved U.S. government funding for the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. This is the organization behind the so-called Climategate controversy, in which a batch of e-mails were published, showing, Issa claimed, that there had been fraud involving “the base numbers” underlying our understanding of climate change. However, three separate investigations have cleared the Climate Research Unit of manipulating research, and its work does not form the basis for our understanding of the issue.
Another dead end. Oh well. Darrell Issa will probably scare up something else to get a headline or two. He's an energetic, ambitious guy.
