Widespread criticism of the TARP bailout centered on several big bank CEOs bowing out of the business while taking huge bonuses, some of which were paid with tax money.
View full sizeThe latest mailer from the Massachusetts Republican Party doesn't tell the whole story when it comes to Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Scott Brown's positions on the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The Massachusetts Republican Party's latest mailed flier attacking Democrat Elizabeth Warren in the Senate race twists the candidate's words when it comes to her position on the Troubled Asset Relief Program which provided nearly $700 billion to financial institutions following the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the overall financial crisis of 2008.
The flier mailed to some households in the Bay State says that Warren supported the TARP bailout while Republican Sen. Scott Brown opposed it, placing the words along with Warren's picture and a pile of cash. But a look at previous statements from the two candidates reveals their respective positions actually aren't that dissimilar.
In January, when Brown's campaign was directly taking aim at Warren over the TARP bailout, Warren said she was in favor of the government doing something, but not a fan of how it was done.
"I want to say two things about TARP. The first one is I think we were right in a financial crisis for the U.S. government to come in and say, ‘We are not going to stand by and let this economy plunge over the edge into a financial abyss and that there comes a time when we’re going to have to put the government’s faith behind our system.’ But I want to say this again. The mistake, from my point of view, was not the movement; it’s how we did it," Warren said at the time.
Brown, in a January 2010 debate with Attorney General Martha Coakley, seemed to state the same viewpoint, saying that "The TARP had a certain benefit to it. I would have targeted it a little bit more and not just a no strings attached situation and I would have allowed certainly to help, but not to pay out these huge bonuses that banks and others are getting."
Brown's campaign didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the apparent discrepancy between Brown's previous statement and the mailer's depiction of his view.
The mailer is not the first time Warren has been strangely tied to being cozy with Wall Street. A year ago, before the People's Pledge dissuaded outside group's from interjecting in the race, Crossroads GPS, a conservative super PAC guided by GOP strategist Karl Rove, launched a TV ad accusing the one-time overseer of the TARP bailout of being an ally for the big banks.
Warren, in her role as special adviser to the Secretary of the Treasury for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under President Barack Obama, provided oversight the implementation of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, but did not have Congressional authority to decide how financial institutions disbursed the money.
Widespread criticism of the TARP bailout centered on several big bank CEOs bowing out of the business while taking huge bonuses, some of which were paid with tax money.