JUST IN: Representative Darrell Issa has just violated the STOCK Act.
— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) September 26, 2024
He disclosed $175,000,000 (!!!!) of Treasury transactions late, by over 500 days.
His fine for breaking the law will be $200, if he is forced to pay it.
Most in Congress do not pay the fine.
Remember the car alarms that would go off in the middle of the night and the owner couldn't or wouldn't turn them off until 30 minutes to an hour later back in the 1990s? You can thank Darrell Issa for that.
from the July 15, 2023, Daily Beast,
Issa’s origin story was anything but promising. In 1970, he dropped out of high school and joined the army. A member of Issa’s army unit, First Sergeant (Ret.) Jay Bergey, told a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, that Issa stole his yellow Dodge and took it to Cleveland in 1971. “I confronted Issa,” he said. “I got in his face and threatened to kill him, and magically my car reappeared the next day, abandoned on the turnpike.” Issa, who described Bergey as an alcoholic, categorically denies ever stealing his car. No charges were ever filed.
A month later (in 1971), Issa and his older brother, William, were arrested for allegedly stealing a red Maserati in Cleveland, Ohio. The case was eventually dropped.
Seven years later—in a separate incident—the Issa brothers were indicted for grand theft. The details are confusing, and the case was also later dropped. But as the New Yorker’s, Ryan Lizza later described it, the allegation was that “the two men had conspired to fraudulently sell Darrell’s car [a Mercedes sedan] and then collect the insurance money.” The case was also later dropped.
Next, Issa started an electronics manufacturing company called Quantum Enterprises. After one of their client’s loans became delinquent, Issa orchestrated what Lizza calls a “hostile takeover” of the client’s car alarm business, Steal Stopper. According to Jack Frantz, a former employee of Steal Shopper, Issa placed a box containing a gun on his desk before firing him. Issa denies “ever pull[ing] a gun on anyone in my life.”
Then, in 1982, Issa’s manufacturing plant mysteriously burned down. According to the Los Angeles Times, “Circumstantial evidence aroused suspicion of arson,” and the founder of Steal Stopper alleged Issa was the culprit. “Fire investigators also noted that a computer was taken off the site eight days before the fire, ‘allegedly to be reprogrammed’ by Issa’s lawyer, and that business blueprints were put away in a safe—which was ‘not previously done before,’” according to another report from the Los Angeles Times.
Investigators also noted that Issa had dramatically increased his fire insurance just weeks before the blaze occurred. As the New Yorker reported, “The Ohio state fire marshal never determined the cause of the fire and no one was ever charged with a crime. According to Issa, St. Paul [the insurer] paid Quantum twenty-five thousand dollars but refused to pay his claim for the Steal Stopper inventory. Issa sued St. Paul for a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, and the two parties eventually settled out of court for about twenty thousand dollars.”
Later, Issa sold Steal Stopper, moved to California, and started Directed Electronics, Inc. His new company produced aftermarket car security products, including the Viper car alarm, where Issa’s own voice can be heard commanding, “Please step away from the car.”
You don’t get to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars without accruing real estate and other investments. But Issa’s fortune was made in the car security business. He then used that accumulated fortune to kickstart his political career in 2000. When reporters started asking questions about his past brushes with the law, Issa responded by throwing his brother, Bill, under the Maserati. “When people ask me why I got into the car alarm business, I tell them the truth,” he said in a statement to the San Francisco Chronicle. “It was because my brother was a car thief.”
That’s right. In a story reminiscent of Frank Abagnale (portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can), Darrell Issa, one of the richest members of Congress, a man who formerly served as the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and is worth approximately $250 million, was accused of stealing cars with his brother (all formal charges against him were dropped)—before making hundreds of millions protecting cars from thieves. For whatever reason, the charges against him kept being dropped.
