Who sent you?

According to Senator Dodd, certain unnamed persons from Treasury persuaded him to insert the amendment allowing the AIG bonuses to go forward. The Hartford Courant says

The senator said he agreed to the change to protect the compensation restrictions he was seeking. He refused to name the U.S. Treasury officials who asked him to add the language that paved the way for the bonuses, saying that much of the detailed work on the bill was done on the staff level.

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It boggles the mind to think that junior staffers could fix this up on their own. Just One Minute notices that transcripts of the House hearings on the AIG bailout suggest that Secretary Geithner may have known about the plan to exempt the bonuses for far longer than it admits. Now ABC News reports that Treasury is launching an internal investigation of who “knew what, how, when and why”.

But an internal Treasury investigation might not have the requisite scope to examine whether Geithner was told to go forward by his superiors. “Seeking to quell the furor over how Geithner and other administration officials have handled the situation, President Obama yesterday said he has ‘complete confidence in Tim Geithner and my entire economic team,’ and that he believed Geithner has made ‘all the right moves’ in handling AIG.” President Obama had earlier said of himself that “the buck stops here”. Or does the buck stop at Treasury?