“We could hold 600 investigations perhaps.”
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who will become chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee when the 112th Congress is sworn in this week, announced tonight that the Pigford Scandal will be investigated though not by his committee.
Representative Issa also said that there are 600 investigations perhaps he could hold on the previous Congress and administration but he does not have the time or resources.
Here’s the transcript:
Rep. Issa: “We’ve been asked for quite a while to begin to talk about the order to which we will take on important hearings so we released the first six. We could have released sixty. We could have released 600 perhaps. At the end of the day there is so much in government that in the next two years even if we did a hearing every single day on every single sub committee, we couldn’t do all the areas of waste, fraud and abuse…”
Jim Hoft: Another item that I don’t think is getting a lot of attention but has been out on the internet some and that is the Pigford Scandal. That is not one of the items you have listed. Is it because it is so, it’s a billion dollars. Is it just chump change compared to some of these other items?
Rep Issa: As you know the Pigford Scandal is really one that falls under two other committees. One of the things that I have to know in my committee is I have to leverage my resources. I have to use every asset I can get including all the other committees to do what they can. So, Pigford, we’ll participate but we’ll make sure other committees do their work. Just like the New Black Panthers Party. That’s a civil rights violation in addition to being a voting violation. We’re going to make sure judiciary does most of the work on that and Chairman Lamar Smith intends to.
