Darrell Issa

Darrell Issa
Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee
Incumbent
Assumed office January 3, 2011
Preceded by	Edolphus Towns
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from California's 49th district
Incumbent
Assumed office January 3, 2001
Preceded by	Ron Packard
Personal details
Born	(1953-11-01) November 1, 1953 Cleveland, Ohio
Political party	Republican
Spouse	Kathy Issa
Children	William Issa
Residence	Vista, California
Alma mater	Kent State University Stark, Siena Heights College
Occupation	Businessman
Military service
Branch/service	United States Army
Years of service	1970–1980

Darrell Edward Issa (Arabic: عيسىpronounced /ˈaɪsə/; born November 1, 1953) is the U.S. Representative for California's 49th congressional district, and previously the 48th, serving since 2001. He is a member of the Republican Party. He was formerly a CEO of Directed Electronics, the Vista, California-based manufacturer of automobile security and convenience products. His district consists of portions of southern Riverside County and northern San Diego County. The district was numbered as the 48th District during his first term and was renumbered the 49th after the 2000 Census. Since January 2011, he has served as Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Aside from his service in Congress, Issa is also known for being a major contributor to the 2003 recall election of Governor Gray Davis, and a guest speaker at Republican events. His net worth has been estimated at more than $300 million, making him the richest member of Congress.

Early life

Issa was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the grandson of Lebanese immigrants. His mother was a Mormon and his father Eastern Orthodox; he was the second of their six children. The family moved to the predominantly Jewish suburb of Cleveland Heights later in his childhood. Many of his friends were Jewish, and Issa worked for a rabbi at one point. He became very familiar with Jewish culture.

Military Career, Education, and Alleged Criminal Activity

Issa dropped out of high school and enlisted for a three-year tour in the Army on his 17th birthday. He served as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) technician, defusing bombs, after having been shown a movie about soldiers in that specialty during World War II. He would later claim his unit had provided security for President Richard Nixon, sweeping stadiums for bombs prior to games in the 1971 World Series, and that he had always received the highest approval ratings during his service. A 1998 investigation by the San Francisco Examiner found that these claims were not true: Nixon did not attend any of that year's World Series games, and at one point Issa was transferred to a supply depot after receiving an unsatisfactory evaluation. According to Issa, the Examiner reporter had misunderstood an anecdote he had related.

A fellow soldier, Jay Bergey, claimed that Issa stole his Dodge Charger in 1971 while they were serving together and that, the day after he confronted Issa, the car was found abandoned on a nearby expressway. Asked about this charge in 2011, Issa denied it and suggested it was possible that other soldiers stole the car or that Bergey, who he claims had a drinking problem, had abandoned it himself while intoxicated."

After receiving a hardship discharge in 1972 following his father's heart attack, Issa earned his General Educational Development (GED) certificate and began taking classes at Siena Heights University, a small Catholic college in Adrian, Michigan. He continued his military service in the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC)."

Twice during that year he was arrested. In March, Issa and his brother William were charged with stealing a Maserati from a dealer's showroom in Cleveland. Issa says it was a matter of mistaken identity by the Cleveland Heights police; the case was later dismissed.

Before that had happened, in December 1972, police in Adrian pulled Issa over for going the wrong way on a one-way street and, as he was retrieving his registration, saw in the car's glove compartment what turned out to be a .25-caliber Colt semi-automatic handgun inside an ammunition box, along with a military pouch containing 44 rounds, a tear gas gun and two rounds for that. Issa was charged with carrying a concealed weapon; ultimately he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of possession of an unregistered firearm. He was sentenced to six months' probation and paid a small fine. At the time Issa told police that Ohio law allowed such possession of a handgun with a justification; his was the need to protect the car and himself. Years later, he said that the car and gun were his brother's, which William Issa supported. He had been unaware of the gun's presence when inadvertently driving the car the wrong way down the alley and that, to the extent of his knowledge, there had been no ammunition present. The entire incident, he had believed, had been expunged.

Issa later transferred to Kent State University Stark, where he completed his studies. His brother William believes this period shaped Issa's conservatism, in contrast to the leftism that prevailed among much of the student body there. After graduating with a degree in business administration in 1976, he returned to active Army service as an officer.

He served as a tank platoon leader and a computer research and development specialist. During this time, his performance assessments were highly positive. In 1980, while he was stationed at Fort Ord near Monterey, California, one of his superiors, Wesley Clark, later a general and Democratic presidential candidate, wrote that "[t]his officer's performance far exceeded that of any other reserve officer who has worked in the battalion." Captain Issa, he said, had "unlimited potential" and should be promoted ahead of others.

Issa decided to return to civilian life instead. A week before he was discharged, he and his brother were arrested again on theft charges. Near the end of 1979, William Issa, who by then had served federal and state prison time for theft, had sold his brother's 1976 Mercedes-Benz sedan to a San Jose dealership for $16,000, giving the dealer an Ohio license with Issa's name on it. Issa had soon reported the car stolen and told the police he had left the title certificate in the trunk. Issa made conflicting statements to police about whether or not he had obtained a second license and also about his brother, whom he had recently seen at Christmas in Cleveland Heights. With the investigator suspicious that the brothers might have conspired to commit insurance fraud, they were indicted. Issa said he had no knowledge of his brother's intentions; William said Issa had given him power of attorney a few weeks beforehand and had authorized him to sell the car. Issa bought the Mercedes back from the dealership for $17,000 in February; in August, the case was dropped.

In 2011, Issa acknowledged that he had tried to cover his brother's crime, avoiding incriminating him. Both men say that William Issa planned and executed the scheme; William says Issa had "always kept the title stuff in his car". According to Issa, he remained close to his brother in spite of his brother's activities and had ridden, as a boy, with William in cars he knew must have been stolen, saying in 2011 that "I admired my brother even when he was doing wrong.... I was always the kid at his ankles."

Business career

After leaving the military, Issa and his second wife, Kathy Stanton, moved back to the Cleveland area, pooled their savings, sold their cars and borrowed $50,000 from his family to invest in Quantum Enterprises, an electronics manufacturer run by a friend from Cleveland Heights that assembled bug zappers, CB radio parts and other consumer products for other companies. One of those clients, car alarm manufacturer Steal Stopper, would become the path to Issa's fortune. It was struggling badly, and he took control of it by foreclosing a $60,000 loan he had made to it when its founder, Joey Adkins, missed a payment. Adkins remained as an employee. Issa is now worth $451 million.

1982 factory fire

Issa soon turned Steal Stopper around, to the point that it was supplying Ford with thousands of car alarms and negotiating a similar deal with Toyota. But early in the morning of September 7, 1982, the offices and factory of Quantum and Steal Stopper in the Cleveland suburb of Maple Heights, caught fire. The fire took three hours to put out; the buildings and almost all inventory within were destroyed.

The Ohio state fire marshal never determined a cause for the blaze. The initial theory was that it was electrical, but the insurance company came to doubt the theory when a fire analysis report it commissioned outlined evidence that the fire could be arson. It had exhibited two distinct areas of origin, both with "suspicious burn patterns" but without any "accidental source of heating power." Investigators believed that a stack of cardboard boxes, which had burned in a manner inconsistent with an accidental fire, may have had a flammable liquid spread on them. The black smoke and blue flames generated by the fire strongly suggested the use of a hydrocarbon-based accelerant, and the report said the same mix of four distinct hydrocarbons had been found in samples of burned material taken from different locations in the ruins. Adkins, still employed by Steal Stopper, told the insurance investigators that prior to the blaze Issa had removed not only the company's Apple II personal computer but all hardware, software and manuals for it, as well as diskettes containing all the company's customer records and financial information. He said that silkscreens used by Steal Stopper in the production of its circuit boards had also been placed in a fireproof box. Insurance investigators determined that a short time before the fire, Issa had more than quadrupled Steal Stopper's fire insurance coverage; they were also concerned that they could not determine the source of his initial investment in the company.

When questioned about the fire by Ryan Lizza in a 2011 New Yorker article, Issa dismissed some of the actions Adkins described. He had removed the computer from the building, he said, so that his lawyer could help him install new accounting software and had increased Quantum's insurance coverage on his agent's suggestion because Quantum was storing inventory for several of its customers. He suggested the real beneficiary was Pied Piper, a small bug-zapper maker who lost inventory in the fire and whose own facilities burned down several years later (one of the owners of that now-defunct company told Lizza he believed Issa had started the fire to destroy evidence that he had defrauded Pied Piper). According to Issa, the fire was as damaging as it had been due to the incompetence of the firefighters, who failed to discover at first that it was being fed by natural gas from an overhead heater that had ruptured, which might have caused the blue flames attributed to arson. Had it been turned off earlier, most of what was lost could have been saved.

Quantum received $25,000 from the insurance company, but, according to Issa, Steal Stopper was refused reimbursement for inventory. A $175,000 suit against the insurance company brought by Issa was later settled for $20,000. In 2011, Issa said that the denial of inventory claims was not a result of doubt as to the cause of the fire but because the remaining inventory had been stolen by Adkins after the fire to start his own business elsewhere. Adkins acknowledged taking the inventory on the understanding that it was to have been scrapped. His brother later sold the merchandise back to Issa, who paid with a check he stopped before it could be cashed. Issa was able to get the company running again from a new location within a month.

Move to California

Steal Stopper soon regained its previous prosperity. Car theft rose in the United States during the 1980s, and with it the demand for security devices. Rolls Royce, BMW and General Motors joined Ford and Toyota as customers. In 1985 Issa sold the company to a California-based maker of home alarms, and moved to the San Diego suburb of Vista, where he has lived ever since, to work for it. Shortly afterward he left to start Directed Electronics, Inc. (DEI).

He recorded the "Please step away from the car", warning for DEI's signature product, the Viper car alarm. Sales grew from a million dollars its first year to $14 million by 1989. DEI diversified, and eventually became one of the largest makers of aftermarket electronic automotive accessories in the U.S. As of 2004, Directed Electronics was North America's largest aftermarket automotive electronics manufacturer. Issa divested personal interest in Directed Electronics after being elected to public office.

From his involvement in consumer-electronics trade organizations, he began to get politically active. He went to Washington to lobby Congress and became one of California's largest individual campaign contributors to Republican candidates. In 1996 he backed the successful campaign to pass Proposition 209, a ballot initiative which prohibitted public institutions in California from considering race, sex, or ethnicity. He was instrumental in persuading the national Republican Party to hold its 1996 convention in San Diego.

Political career

1998 U.S. Senate campaign

Issa's first campaign for elected office came in 1998, when he sought the Republican nomination for United States Senate to run against incumbent Democrat Barbara Boxer. He backed the campaign with $10 million of his personal wealth, but lost the primary election to California State Treasurer Matt Fong. Fong's campaign raised $3 million from contributions and complained that Issa's wealth made for an uneven playing field (Issa had only $400,000 in contributions). An Issa spokesman countered that the money was needed to compensate for Fong's statewide name recognition. Fong prevailed in the open primary by a margin of 22 percent to 20 percent for Issa. A San Francisco exit poll suggested that large numbers of Asian-Americans had crossed party lines to vote for Fong.

U.S. House of Representatives

Two years after Issa's failed Senate bid, Congressman Ron Packard, a nine-term incumbent, announced his retirement. Issa capitalized on his name recognition from the 1998 Senate race, winning the 2000 Republican primary against State Senator Bill Morrow and the general election.

During his 2002 run for re-election, the Democrats failed to field a candidate, and his closest competition was from Libertarian Karl Dietrich. A write-in candidate from that election, Mike Byron, went on to become the Democratic challenger in 2004.

Issa currently serves on the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs, the House Judiciary Committee, and the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, of which he is the Ranking Member.

Issa mounted an unsuccessful campaign to join the ranks of the House GOP leadership hierarchy. He finished third of the four candidates vying for the chairmanship of the House Republican Policy Committee, and was ultimately passed over in favor of Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan.

Gubernatorial recall

Issa came to national prominence when he contributed over $1.6 million to help fund a signature-gathering drive for the petition to recall Gray Davis. At the time he made the contribution, it was widely believed that Issa intended to place himself on the ballot to replace Davis. However, following the entrance of fellow Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger into the race, two days before the filing deadline, Issa announced that he would not run. Issa later said that his mission had been accomplished since Davis was recalled and he wanted to continue representing his district in Congress and work towards Middle East peace. When reporters raised the issue of his 1972 weapons conviction Issa responded by saying, "I don't think 30-year-old misdemeanors are fair play here."

For the recall election, Issa endorsed Schwarzenegger. At one point in the campaign he suggested that people should vote against recalling Davis unless one of the two leading Republican contenders dropped out, concerned that Schwarzenegger and fellow Republican Tom McClintock would split votes, resulting in Democratic lieutenant governor Cruz Bustamante taking over as Davis' successor.

Middle East involvement

As one of the few Lebanese-Americans in Congress, Issa has had a significant but sometimes controversial role in U.S. peace initiatives in the Middle East. He traveled to Lebanon and Syria in an effort to negotiate the end of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. In 2003, he appeared at a Washington rally by Iranian groups protesting against the Islamic government in Iran.

In 2001, Issa's district office in San Clemente was targeted in an aborted bombing plot. Jewish Defense League leader Irving Rubin was arrested along with Earl Krugel in connection with the plot, which reportedly had focused on other targets before shifting to Issa's office. Issa speculated that the cause of the incident may have been a column written by political commentator Debbie Schlussel in which she charged that Issa sympathized with Hezbollah despite its being listed by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization, charges he denied.

Issa supported the use of military force in Iraq (2002) and Afghanistan. On 16 June 2006 he voted to reject setting timetables for withdrawal from Iraq. On 5 April 2007, Issa met with Syrian president Bashar Assad to discuss Middle East issues, one day after Assad met with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

As of 2010, Issa serves as a director of the American Task Force for Lebanon, a nonprofit organization working to advance Lebanon and its ties with the US.

2008 House election

Main article: United States House of Representatives elections in California, 2008

In 2008, Issa defeated Democratic candidate Robert Hamilton, prevailing by a 20 point margin.

In 2010, Project on Government Oversight, a government watchdog group, awarded Issa with its Good Government Award for his contributions to government oversight and transparency. These included publicizing documents produced by the New York Federal Reserve Bank in response to a congressional subpoena, publicly exposing the New York Federal Reserve's secret "back-door bailout" of AIG's counterparties, and cofounding a Transparency Caucus dedicated to "promoting a more open and accountable government through education, legislation, and oversight."

Political views

Issa has voted with the majority of House Republicans 94.7 percent of the time during the 111th Congress. He has generally conservative political views.

He is generally opposed to abortion, but has supported stem cell research, saying that "The promise of stem cells to provide innovative treatments and cures warrants investment in more advanced research".

He voted for the authorization (and later reauthorization) of the PATRIOT Act and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. He voted for the reauthorization of the Patriot Act in 2005 after successfully amending it to require judicial notification, reporting requirements and facts justifying the use of roving survelliance at new facilities or places.

He voted against the Employment Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA), which would prohibit employers from discriminating on the basis of actual or perceived sexual orientation.

He has opposed attempts to ease restrictions on illegal immigration such as the "Blue Card" system, saying that it provides amnesty for illegal immigrants.

He claims to support efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but voted against a bill to cut them. Issa also believes that "the science community does not agree to the extent of the problem or the critical threshold of when this problem is truly catastrophic."

He has been critical of No Child Left Behind, supporting a modification that would, in his words, "give states the freedom to adopt best practices for their students by returning flexibility and control to the educators and parents who are the real experts on education".

He has signed the "Taxpayer Protection Pledge" of the Americans for Tax Reform, an organization that opposes all tax increases.

He has endorsed Mitt Romney's candidacy for the Republican nomination for the 2012 presidential election.

Committee assignments

• Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (Chairman)
  • As Chairman of the full committee, Rep. Issa may serve as an ex officio member of all subcommittees
• Committee on the Judiciary
  • Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law
  • Subcommittee on Courts and Competition Policy

• Republican Study Committee

Obama administration

After becoming Chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Issa has become a vocal advocate for investigations into the Obama administration, including the TARP and Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, corruption in Afghanistan, Wikileaks, and the FDA, among other issues. On March 22, 2011, it was reported that he accused the administration of retaliating against Catherine Papoi, who complained the administration was blocking public access to records.

Criticism and controversy

Industry insiders on his oversight team

In February 2011, the Watchdog Institute, an independent nonprofit reporting center based at San Diego State University, published an investigation alleging that as leader of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Issa built a team that included staff members with close connections to industries that could benefit from his investigations. For instance, several had ties to big oil billionaire brothers, David and Charles Koch, whose companies could benefit from changes in regulations. The Huffington Post also published the Institute's investigation.

9/11

In April 2008, the Daily News reported that Issa had said that the federal government "'just threw' buckets of cash at New York for an attack 'that had no dirty bomb in it, it had no chemical munitions in it.'" He was also reported as having asked "why the firefighters who went there and everybody in the city of New York needs to come to the federal government for the dollars versus this being primarily a state consideration." In September 2009, Issa's office released a statement indicating that his comments had been misrepresented and that the questions he asked concerned unpassed bill H.R. 3543, which, according to that statement "would give U.S. taxpayer dollars to those who did not suffer physical injury and did not work at or around Ground Zero."

Letter to businesses

Following the 2010 elections, Issa sent a letter to more than 150 trade associations, companies and think tanks, asking them to tell him which existing and proposed regulations would harm job growth. Liberal critics have charged that Issa was "embracing regulatory capture." Elijah Cummings, the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said Issa's letters were tantamount to “inviting businesses to tell us what they want us to do as opposed to protecting the American people.”

Office of Congressional Ethics complaint

In September 2011, the group American Family Voices filed an ethics complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics against Issa, alleging that he has repeatedly used his public office for personal financial gain. The group claimed that Issa used his position with the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to intervene in dealings with Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and others, where he had a financial interest at play. In one instance, the complaint claimed that Issa intervened in an investigation of Bank of America's acquisition of Merrill Lynch while being a "major" customer who "bought and sold more than $200 million in Merrill Lynch mutual funds in the days after the Bank of America acquisition." Issa's office rejected the allegations and the Office of Congressional Ethics has not responded publicly to the complaint.

External links

• U.S. Congressman Darrell Issa official U.S. House site
• Darrell Issa for U.S. Congressman official campaign site
• Biography at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• Financial information (federal office) at the Federal Election Commission
• Profile at Vote Smart
• Directed Electronics
• Darrell Issa: Enter Stage Right, profile in Mother Jones magazine
• Williams, Lance. Issa's Army record in doubt: Candidate's account can't be verified. San Francisco Chronicle. 29 May 1998.