Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., is heavily leveraged and his debts may even exceed his assets, according to an amended financial disclosure form for 2008 that for the first time reveals hundreds of thousands of dollars in previously unreported loans from federal credit unions and banks. Wilson made headlines Wednesday night for yelling "Lie. You lie," at President Obama during an address to a joint session of Congress. Now, it turns out that the personal financial disclosure form Wilson filed with the House of Representatives in May was grossly inaccurate.
Lawmakers are required to declare what they own and disclose -- within a pretty wide range -- how much each asset is worth and how much income it provided. The intention of the disclosure law is to let constituents see the connections, if any, between their elected officials' public duties and private financial interests.
In Wilson's case, he updated a form revealing what he owned in 2008. The new version, filed at the end of July, has different assets than he identified in May.
Wilson now reports that his assets at year's end (not counting his residence) fall somewhere between $952,000 and $2,030,000.
Much of that was tied up in property owned by the Moseley Wilson Partnership, of which he is a name partner.
His debts, in the form of personal loans and mortgages, fall somewhere between $880,012 to $1,930,000.
A significant chunk of that debt -- between $375,000 and $800,000-- hadn't been disclosed before.
The form Wilson filed in May listed just one asset: An investment account at Capital Bank worth between $1,001 and $15,000 and one liability -- a debt to the South Carolina Student Loan Corporation of between $1,001 and $15,000. Puzzlingly, both of those entries disappeared in the amended filing.
A Wilson aide did not reply to e-mailed requests for information, and phone lines to Wilson's office were jammed.
The amended filing shows some previously unreported income -- between $45,005 and $145,000 in property rental income and nearly $40,000 in retirement payments from the U.S. military, the state of South Carolina and the South Carolina National Guard.
That report also omitted $27,397 in trips he took with at least one family member to Baltimore, Charleston, S.C., and Tel Aviv, Israel, that were funded by, respectively, the Heritage Foundation, the German Marshall Fund and the American Israel Education Foundation, which is an arm of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
Some of the assets and debts disclosed in the new filing were reported in past years but not in Wilson's original May report.