Sen. Phil Gramm, chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, issued the following statement today after releasing a staff report that details efforts by independent bank examiners at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to fulfill a White House-led effort to drum up political support for the Community Reinvestment Act:

"This report shows how vulnerable a regulatory agency is when it is part of a politically driven entity like the Treasury Department.

"Regulators exert extensive power as it is. When politics is injected in the regulatory process, as happened in the Comptroller's office, the process becomes abusive.

"This is vivid evidence of the danger posed by the administration's proposal to take regulatory power from the independent Federal Reserve and give it to the Treasury Department. The proposal is a political power grab that must be defeated."