Remember last October when Paul Hodes tucked tail and ran to avoid an ethics vote that would implicate his democrat committee chariman (here)? Well that Chairman, Edolphus Towns, has just been implicated in a missrepresentation of details that made Toyota look worse than was actually the case.
Turns out that House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Edolphus Towns (D., NY) falsely represented “smoking gun” legal documents alleging Toyota deliberately withheld documents that proved it was guilty.
Concludes Issa: “Based on staff review and analysis of the documents . . . (Towns) frequently misquotes and mischaracterizes the underlying material, in one extreme case, actually altering the subject of the underlying document."
So as a sitting democrat member of this committee with an obvious bias about ethics charges against his committee and party leadership, did Paul Hodes know or take part in the manipulation of this data for the benefit of his masters and the government run car makers who could stand to benefit from any shift in perception about Toyota reliability?
I don’t know the answer yet, but it’s worth looking in to. Mr. Hodes has made deals in the past to make his boss look better, courtesy of then governor Jeanne Shaheen when as a lawyer for Shaheen/Gordon Hodes helped plea the 2.4 million dollar embezzelment case against Rosie Mcnamara (and a big "how did Shaheen’s DRA fail to notice?") down to $111K and a shortened sentence. No drawn out press party. No ugly questions for the State to answer. In fact almost no reporting at all. Just a 4$/1000 increase in Ashland’s property taxes to cover McNamara’s massive gamling losses on the taxpayer dime, and to hide the incompetence of Shaheen’s office.
So Hodes will help hide the truth. But did he help hide the truth here?
