Decorum Breaks Down at House Hearing

Representative Patrick T. McHenry, a North Carolina Republican who is chairman of a subcommittee of the House oversight committee, told Ms. Warren, who is directing the start of the consumer agency, that he believed she had misled Congress about her role in settlement talks between government authorities and mortgage servicing companies.

Ms. Warren denied Mr. McHenry’s accusation, saying that she clearly stated in March that she had provided advice to officials of the Treasury and Justice Departments about their investigations of fraud among mortgage-servicing companies and about their settlement discussions with the companies.

The argument was a rare collapse of the decorum that usually pervades discussions among even the most fervent opponents on Capitol Hill. It demonstrated the level of frustration some Republicans apparently have over the consumer agency, its leadership and its authority as established by the Dodd-Frank Act that followed the financial and mortgage crisis.

After an hour in which Ms. Warren repeatedly parried efforts by Mr. McHenry and other Republicans to pin her down with “yes or no” answers to questions about her March testimony — and about the bureau’s powers and responsibilities — Mr. McHenry abruptly moved for a temporarily recess so lawmakers could attend a floor vote.

Ms. Warren objected, saying that she had agreed to be present for only an hour and had no more time. Mr. McHenry disagreed and said that other subcommittee members still had questions for her.

A vigorous back and forth ensued.

“Congressman, you are causing problems,” Ms. Warren said. “We had an agreement.”

“You’re making this up,” Mr. McHenry replied, eliciting gasps from the audience. “This is not the case.”

As Mr. McHenry and Ms. Warren traded accusations, a senior Democrat, Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, tried to smooth things over. “Mr. Chairman,” he said, “I’m trying to be cordial here — you just accused the lady of lying. You need to clear this up with your staff.”

Mr. McHenry did not back down. After the meeting broke, he said in a statement: “I was shocked by Ms. Warren’s blatant sense of entitlement. She was apparently under the assumption that she could dictate a one-hour time limit for her testimony to Congress, and that we were there at her behest instead of the other way around.  This is just further example of her disregard for Congressional oversight.”

The hearing was intended to address how much supervision Congress should require for the agency. Republicans have introduced bills to eliminate some of the bureau’s independence; for example, the bureau is not subject to Congressional appropriations. A group of 44 Republican senators recently signed a letter saying they would not allow a director of the agency to be confirmed unless the Obama administration agreed to structural changes in the agency.

Faced with strong opposition to Ms. Warren, a Harvard professor, President Obama has not nominated her to lead the new bureau. In fact, officials in the Democratic Party are trying to pressure her to return to Massachusetts to run for the United States Senate in 2012.

While there were some questions about oversight, Ms. Warren apparently came to the hearing expecting a hostile reception on other topics. On Tuesday morning, hours before the afternoon hearing, Mr. McHenry said on CNBC that he believed she had lied to Congress.

“I question the veracity of her former testimony in relation to the reality that we now see,” he said, referring to documents indicating that the consumer bureau had advised the Iowa attorney general on the terms of a possible settlement between federal and state regulators and mortgage servicing companies.

Asked by the CNBC correspondent if that meant she had been lying when she said she was only an adviser, Mr. McHenry replied, “Sure.”

During the hearing, Mr. McHenry displayed the documents, which he said indicated that Ms. Warren’s involvement extended outside her designated role as an adviser to the president and the Treasury secretary to set up the new consumer bureau.

“You said you were providing advice to the Treasury secretary,” Mr. McHenry said. “Now it is apparent that you were providing advice to the attorney general of Iowa,” regarding lawsuits against mortgage servicers.

Ms. Warren said she provided advice to state and federal agencies at the direction of the Treasury secretary, adding that she had been open about her meetings and involvement in the talks. She said she had provided that information two months ago in response to a letter from House members and had heard nothing back since then.

Those exchanges led a Democrat on the subcommittee to apologize “for the rude and disrespectful behavior of the chair.” Representative John Yarmuth, a Kentucky Democrat, said to Ms. Warren that Mr. McHenry’s accusation “indicates to me that this hearing is all about you, because people are afraid of you and your ability to communicate in very clear terms the threats to our consumers.”

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Egypt is Moving to Try Mubarak in Fatal Protests

The charge could incur the death penalty. Mr. Mubarak was also accused of obtaining his seaside mansion in Sharm el Sheik as a kickback from a friend for a corrupt land deal, and prosecutors accused his two sons, Gamal and Alaa, of receiving a total of four other villas there as part of the same kickback.  And in a third charge,  prosecutors said the former president allowed the same friend to siphon $714 million in public money out of a deal to sell natural gas to Israel.

The charges — brought by prosecutors Mr. Mubarak had appointed — included hints that former subordinates might testify against him, as onetime allies and government insiders turn on one another.

 A Cairo criminal court is expected to set a trial date within days, and the Egyptian people could soon see the leader whose iron fist ruled them for nearly three decades seated in the steel cage that serves as a docket in Egyptian courtrooms.

 Alarmed by the calls for Mr. Mubarak’s prosecution,  the Saudi royal family has for weeks urged Egypt’s current military rulers to avoid harsh treatment, fearing that it could intensify unrest in the region, according to Saudi officials and a Western diplomat. Some argue that watching Mr. Mubarak endure the humiliation of a criminal trial and potential conviction could harden the resolve of embattled leaders like Bashar al-Assad of Syria and Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen to hang on to power at any cost.

But organizers of the Tahrir Square demonstrations that ousted Mr. Mubarak have called for a new protest Friday to urge, among other things, swifter prosecution of the former president. Some argued that the military council was capitulating.

“It is a reaction,” said Islam Lotfy, a leader of the youth wing of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The military council, led by Mr. Mubarak’s former defense minister, is now running the country, and the charges against Mr. Mubarak are the strongest indication yet that Egyptian officials are moving to distance themselves from their former leaders even before the parliamentary elections expected this fall. The charges accused Mr. Mubarak of killing protesters “by agreeing with Habib el-Adly, the former interior minister, and some police leaders,” suggesting that some may even have testified against the former president.

Mr. Adly, deeply despised and once widely feared, has already been sentenced to 12 years in prison for corruption and awaits trial on a second charge of directing the killing of civilians. Adel el-Said, a spokesman for the prosecutor, declined to comment, except to say that no interior minister could have ordered the killing of unarmed civilians without the president’s consent.

About 850 people died, many from police bullets, during the 18 days of demonstrations that brought down Mr. Mubarak, according to Egyptian officials.

Mr. Mubarak is charged with conspiring “with premeditation” to kill “peaceful” demonstrators, and also with “inciting some officers and members of the police to fire their weapons at the victims, shoot them and run over them with vehicles, and to kill some of them in order to terrorize the rest and force them to relinquish their demands.”

The corruption charges evidently date back many years and involve Hussein Salem, a billionaire landowner and ally of Mr. Mubarak. Mr. Salem, who is also charged with corruption, left Egypt before he was implicated in any wrongdoing. An Interpol arrest warrant has reportedly been issued.

The first corruption charge relates to a large tract of prime land on the Red Sea coast of the South Sinai area, around Sharm el Sheik. Prosecutors charge that Mr. Mubarak exploited his influence to allow Mr. Salem to buy at a deeply discounted price from the Egyptian government in a privatization deal. In return Mr. Salem provided the Mubaraks with a five luxury villas— four for the two sons worth 14 million Egyptian pounds, or about $2.4 million, and a 161,000-square-foot mansion for Mr. Mubarak worth roughly $4.5 million.

The second corruption charge concerns a separate deal for the sale of natural gas to Israel that has been the subject of rumors and suspicions here for years. In this case, prosecutors charge, Mr. Mubarak enabled a middleman company in which Mr. Salem owned a large stake to buy natural gas from the Egyptian government below market price. Mr. Salem’s company may have then resold the gas to Israel at a substantial mark-up, thus enriching himself at the public expense, although the prosecutors’ statement is unclear on those details.

The deal cheated Egypt of $714 million in lost revenue, prosecutors say, but Mr. Salem himself made far more than that. After his company’s role in the gas deal became known, he sold his stake for a profit of $2 billion. The charges did not address Mr. Mubarak’s interest in the deal, other than in helping enrich a friend.

Until now, Mr. Mubarak has been under indefinite detention while recovering from a heart attack in a hospital near his Sharm el Sheik home. The prosecutors said Tuesday that a medical team was examining Mr. Mubarak this week to see if he was fit for transfer to a Cairo prison. His sons and more than a dozen former associates are already waiting behind bars in a prison that had housed political dissidents during the Mubarak era.

The organizers of the Tahrir Square demonstrations have called their planned protest this Friday “the Second Egyptian Revolution” or “the Revolution Part II,” to reiterate a long list of unmet demands, including the prosecution of Mr. Mubarak but also an end to military trials and postponing planned parliamentary elections to give new parties more time to organize.

“The military is trying to give us something to abort what is going to happen on Friday,” Shedy el-Ghazaly Harb, one of the organizers, said. “O.K., it is not a bad step,” he added, “but not good enough to stop us from challenging them about how they are running the country.”

Mona El-Naggar contributed reporting.

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