DURSTIN: Local Boy Makes Bad – Cleveland’s Issa Brings Shame to GOP

By Larry Durstin

The images seen all over television and the Internet last week were startling but shouldn’t have been surprising – especially to those who have followed the career of Darrell Issa since his days growing up in Cleveland Heights in the 1960s and 1970s.

Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, was seen abruptly adjourning his congressional hearing, glowering at the ranking minority member Elijah Cummings and essentially telling him to shut up. The California Republican gave the throat-slitting gesture to his staff as Cummings was reading his statement, then personally reached over and turned Cummings’ microphone off before finally walking away from the meeting as Cummings indignantly continued speaking.

The backdrop for this nearly unprecedented behavior by a committee chairman was Issa’s ridiculous “investigation” into the so-called IRS “scandal,” in which he asserted that the tax status of conservative groups was being targeted at the direction of the Obama administration.

Of course, all that has been uncovered in this lengthy investigation is that the IRS had also “flagged” a comparable number of progressive groups and, in fact, the only group to have its tax-exempt status revoked was Emerge America, a left-leaning organization.

Earlier in his tenure as chairman of the Oversight committee, Issa referred to the Obama administration as the most corrupt in history and called for Obama’s impeachment; banned a female witness from a panel on birth control – leaving an all-male slate of witnesses to testify; called presidential press secretary Jay Carney a “paid liar”; and charged that Hillary Clinton was responsible for the deaths of American in the raid on Benghazi  because she told the Pentagon to “stand down” –  an absurd assertion of which there is absolutely no evidence.

But what few know is that Issa has been on the receiving end of criminal investigations and has had scrapes with the law and curious “misunderstandings” involving friends and associates dating back to the 1970s.  After dropping out of Cleveland Heights High School, Issa enlisted in the Army where he claimed he had provided security for Richard Nixon at the 1971 World Series, sweeping stadiums for bombs. Records show that Nixon never attended the World Series and shortly thereafter Issa was demoted to a supply outpost where a fellow soldier  – Jay Bergey – charged that Issa stole his car. Bergey claims to have confronted Issa and threatened to kill him. The next day the car showed up abandoned on the turnpike.

Three months later, Ohio police arrested Issa and his brother Bill, charging them with stealing a red Maserati from a Cleveland showroom. Issa was indicted but the case was dismissed. That same year he was stopped with a firearm, a tear-gas gun and ammunition for both and was charged with carrying a concealed weapon. He pled guilty and was sentenced to six-months probation.

Then in 1980, the brothers were again indicted for grand theft auto after Bill tried to sell Darrell’s Mercedes by impersonating him at a car dealership. Charges were dropped after Issa – claiming he was the victim of Bill’s actions – went back to the dealership and repurchased the car. In 1981, Issa crashed a truck into another car and left the scene, saying he didn’t have time to wait for the police. The other motorist ended up suing Issa and the case was settled out of court.

Given his history of being implicated in car thefts, it’s somewhat ironic that Issa made his fortune selling auto alarms. But even in that business, Issa courted controversy. In 1982, the offices and factory of his alarm business, Steal Stopper, in Maple Heights caught fire and almost all the inventory was destroyed. One of Issa’s former business associates, Joey Adkins, accused him, on the record, of burning the building down. An investigation noted “suspicious burn patterns” and discovered that Issa had increased his fire insurance policy by nearly 500% three weeks earlier. The local fire marshal never determined the fire’s cause.

Darrell Issa, with a net worth of nearly half a billion dollars, is the wealthiest member of Congress and has used his wealth to build a political career that has featured tasteless name-calling, baseless charges, temper tantrums and bully-boy tactics such as the kind used recently against Elijah Cummings.

As he was leaving the committee room after his disgraceful performance last week, Issa was serenaded by a chorus of “shame, shame” by committee members. He responded to this by accusing Cummings of slandering him and claiming that he himself was the victim – just like he was back in the days when his brother Bill got poor Darrell into all that auto-theft trouble.

[Photo: Maxxum]

 

 

 

Post categories:

• News
• Civic Affairs
• Commentary
• Politics
• Larry Durstin