Elizabeth Warren is a Harvard Law Professor and an expert in bankruptcy. I became familiar with her because of her work on a PBS program about American credit card companies and the dirty deeds they do.

She's also the head of the Congressional oversight committee on the TARP funding, and what she has to say is extremely disturbing, especially in light of the hurry-up-and-pass-the-trillion-dollar-looting-bill nonsense going on right now on Capitol hill.

Ms. Warren, head of TARP’s Congressional oversight panel, told the banking committee that after three months on the job, her panel was still not getting enough answers from Treasury. She described the bailout as “an opaque process at best.”

Ms. Warren said she plans to release a report on Friday that calculates Treasury put about $254 billion into financial institutions in 2008, but got only $176 billion in value.

“That’s a shortfall of about $78 billion,” she said, adding that Mr. Paulson “was not entirely candid” in his description of TARP’s bank capital injection program.

Mr. Barofsky, the independent TARP inspector general at Treasury, raised concerns about potential fraud in one of several programs financed by bailout money, the Federal Reserve’s Term Asset-Backed Loan Facility. “Treasury should consider requiring that some baseline fraud prevention standards be imposed,” Mr. Barofsky said in his first report to Congress.

The story was undoubtedly reported to throw more dirt on the Bush administration, but its worth noting that like defense, this was one of the programs that Obama gave the tacit nod of approval too, by nominating Timothy Geithner, Hank Paulsen's hand-picked successor.

There are a number of remarkable things about the TARP program--in spite of Obama's assurance of an open government--no one, not even Congress can get any information out of the Tarp boys. Fox Business has filed suit to pry loose information as mundane as who got TARP funds--so far no luck. Considering the size of the fund, its astonishing that only 40 people control the whole thing.

So why would the TARP boys overpay for preferred shares in recipient banks? Kick backs are always a possibility, but pretty risky considering the political profile of the program. More likely that Paulsen etal wanted to protect the industry as much as possible from too much "nationalization", making it easier for the banks to eventually pay the feds off.