Apparently the Treasury Department was actually notified of an imminent bonus payment back on February 28th, which is ten days sooner than the Treasury is claiming it was notified of the “full details”. So what exactly is going on here? Did Geithner lie to Congress about the date? Is the situation in his department bad enough that it takes over a week for major issues to reach his desk? There are many questions to be answered, Tim.

Though Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told Congressional leaders Tuesday he only learned of the impending $160 million bonus payments to members of AIG’s troubled financial products unit March 10, sources tell TIME that the New York Federal Reserve informed Treasury staff that the payments were imminent on February 28. That is 10 days before Treasury staffers say they first learned “full details” of the bonus plan, and three days before the Administration launched a new $30 billion infusion of cash for AIG.

“Treasury staff was informed about the new bonuses in a Feb. 28 memo that the March 15 [bonus payment] date was upcoming,” a Federal Reserve source tells Time. A Treasury department source, speaking on background, confirms the e-mail memo and its contents, and says further, “Everybody knew that [AIG] had a retention issue.”…

The Treasury department official says the fault appears to lie with career staffers at the department, who failed to report the imminent bonus deadline up the chain to Geithner. This failure may be a by-product of the difficulty he has had staffing up at Treasury. But Geithner still has some personal vulnerability on the issue. It was he, as head of the New York Federal Reserve, who negotiated the AIG bailout last September. At that time, he could have sought to get bonuses repealed as part of the massive government loan.

Time isn’t exactly a conservative outfit, so there’s no reason for it to lie about the date. In fact, the magazine claims that the New York Fed’s memo specifically warned that AIG sending out bonus payments would become a big issue for the administration. So why is Geithner and the Treasury Department claiming that they only learned about the payments on March 10th?

Via Hot Air.