House Speaker Pelosi claims the Bush Administration prohibited its own officials from briefing Congress until the September 2008 financial collapse was only hours away.

Nearly two years after the Wall Street meltdown drove the U.S. economy to the brink of collapse, and forced the U.S. government to bail it out with hundreds of billions of dollars of TARP money, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi now claims that the Bush Administration prohibited its own top officials who were handling the emerging crisis from briefing Congress until a complete financial collapse was only hours away.

In under-reported comments to journalists at a weekly press conference back in April, Pelosi claimed that the Bush administration knew well in advance that the September 2008 financial crisis would hit, and that Congress would need to authorize a unprecedented and unpopular bailout, but that top officials, including then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, told her that they had been barred from briefing Congress about true extent of the crisis.

House Speaker Pelosi said on September 18th just after Barack Obama accepted the Democratic Presidential nomination, Lehman Brothers had just filed for bankruptcy, and the Federal Reserve had authorized the New York Fed to lend up to $85 billion to insurance giant AIG, that she called Paulson to ask for a full briefing the next morning.

Pelosi recalled, "Paulson said 'that will be too late. That will be too late. Tomorrow morning, 9 o'clock will be too late.' "I asked why am I calling you, why didn't you call me?’ Paulson then said 'We were not allowed to tell Congress, but since you called, we're going to answer your questions.”

Because former Treasury-Secretary Paulson and others would not respond to Pelosi’s comments it is not clear if the Bush Administration's alleged decision not to brief Congress earlier was a calculated strategy to avoid spooking the already shaky financial markets thus worsening the crisis or, try to run out the clock past the 2008 presidential elections and blame the economic collapse on the next administration, or a combination of the two.