Detroit — Overwrought, tort-fed accusations of automakers designing “killing machines” have historically been based on half-baked, even fraudulent, manipulations of data. When Audi was accused of making runaway cars in the 1980s, 60 Minutes doctored accelerator pedals. In 1993 NBC used hidden rockets strapped to the bottom of GM trucks to make them explode to “prove” GM’s side-saddle gas tank design was unsafe.

Now the other shoe is dropping in the Toyota “sudden acceleration” case.

Turns out that House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Edolphus Towns (D., NY) falsely represented “smoking gun” legal documents alleging Toyota deliberately withheld documents that proved it was guilty.

My Detroit News colleague Christine Tierney reports:

(The documents) seemed deeply damaging to Toyota at first glance. But . . . this week, Rep. Darrell Issa of California, the ranking Republican on the House committee, said his staff discovered “factual misrepresentations” in Towns’ (allegations). For instance, Towns cites a memo (Toyota whistle-blower Dimitrios) Biller wrote on Dec. 6, 2006, suggesting that Toyota preferred to settle cases rather than disclose information it kept in so-called “Books of Knowledge.” Towns quotes Biller as saying: “Toyota concludes that it would be better to pay a premium to settle this case and avoid producing the ‘Books of Knowledge.’”
But Issa’s staff said Towns left out a crucial part of the sentence. The full sentence is: “Toyota concludes that it would be better to pay a premium to settle this case and avoid producing the ‘Books of Knowledge’ before Toyota and its counsel had an opportunity to inspect those materials.” Issa’s staff also found that the phrase “sudden unintended acceleration” had been injected into a passage that referred to a suit alleging transmission problems.

Concludes Issa: “Based on staff review and analysis of the documents . . . (Towns) frequently misquotes and mischaracterizes the underlying material, in one extreme case, actually altering the subject of the underlying document.”

In other words, the chairman is lying. When does the recall of defective, tort-bought congressmen begin?

– Henry Payne is an editorial writer and cartoonist for the Detroit News.