This occurred early on, in questioning from chairman Kanjorski and the Republican Scott Garrett.
Kanjorski was pissed because he said he had been urging him to suppress the payments. Then they were distributed on a Saturday night. Liddy said they had been working with the Fed (i.e., Bernanke) on this. Kanjorski was angry at not being informed. Garrett tried to drag Geithner in, but Liddy reiterated that he had worked only with Fed. Didn't the Fed tell Geithner about this all along? Not to Liddy's knowledge.
There's a sort of half-transcript of some of this discussion (poorly analyzed, however) here:
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/03/18/financial-services-aig-hearing-panel-2-liddy/The real problem we are having with this is that we are failing to separate out the general question of Treasury's involvement in the general question of legal problems with abrogating prior signed contracts and the specific question of AIG actually paying out on these contracts. The impression I got, especially from Kanjorski's statements, and Dodd's and Geithners of yesterday/today is that: there was some feeling there was a problem in the government actually legislating the breaking of a contract, but that they were hoping to work behind the scenes to convince the management to supress the payments themselves. This is where Geithner (and Kanjorski) seems to have been left out of the loop until late.