Warren caught fibbing about TARP pay

Rick Moran

Let's cut Elizabeth Warren some slack. She was only off by $128,000 when she first released her salary for being chairman of TARP.

Anybody can make a mistake:

The campaign for Democratic Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren said Friday she had been paid $192,722 for serving as chairman of a congressional committee that monitored the 2008 federal bank bailout, three times as much as had originally been acknowledged.

The Warren campaign revised the figure following a POLITICO report on Thursday, highlighting the fact that the Congressional Oversight Panel, which oversaw the TARP program, has not publicly disclosed exactly how it spent $10.5 million on salaries, travel, consultants and other expenses. Warren said she now supports public access to the oversight panel's records, though her campaign wouldn't say if she plans to actively push to open up the records.

Warren served as the oversight panel's chairman from its creation in the fall of 2008 until September 2010, when President Barack Obama tapped her to help launch the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Senate Republicans, however, blocked her from being formally appointed to head the new agency.

Warren spokesman Kyle Sullivan initially said Warren, who is seeking the Democratic nomination to take on Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) next year, had earned $64,289 for serving on the oversight panel, based on executive-branch financial disclosure statements she filed for 2009 and 2010.

But Sullivan told POLITICO on Friday that the campaign had overlooked $128,433 Warren earned from the panel in 2009.

It's perfectly understandable how someone can "overlook" $128,000 in pay. It's only taxpayer's money, after all, and not even equal to a decimal point when you consider that TARP cost us $800 billion.

Given her careful tabulation of how the people's money is spent, she should fit right in if she wins election to the senate. Those guys can't count any better than she can.