A few days before Christmas, the mood in Representative Darrell Issa’s office was jovial. Outside, the hallways were filled with the House’s equivalent of scalps: wooden pallets piled high with shrink-wrapped boxes belonging to defeated or retiring Democrats. Inside, some of Issa’s closest advisers sat around talking trash. Issa, a six-term California Republican, had recently been elected chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which, according to House rules, “may at any time conduct investigations of any matter.” Now that he had been given the power to subpoena, investigate, and harass the Obama Administration, Issa was being described as a future leader of his party—and the man most likely to weaken the President before the 2012 election.

Issa, the new chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, is seen as a future leader of his party. Illustration by DANIEL ADEL

Issa’s chief of staff, Dale Neugebauer, was wedged into a chair before a semicircular desk. He turned to welcome Kurt Bardella, Issa’s spokesman. On a couch sat Jason Scism, the congressman’s longtime legislative director, who had recently left to become a lobbyist for Research in Motion, the manufacturer of the BlackBerry.

Bardella removed his suit jacket, picked up four darts, and started tossing them with near-perfect aim at a well-used board on the wall. “The thing we discovered with Jason is that he’s unable to play darts sober,” Neugebauer said. “Kurt is actually a phenomenal dart player, but Jason, once he gets about six beers in him, is also phenomenal. They call him Dead-Eye.”

The conversation turned to Issa’s feats of electrical and mechanical engineering. During a recent interview with the Times, Issa repaired a reporter’s old-fashioned microcassette recorder. Years ago, Neugebauer recalled, Issa fixed a malfunctioning sound board in the middle of a talk-show interview.

An inveterate gadget junkie who was once the chairman of the Consumer Electronics Association, Issa often acts as the office’s I.T. manager. “If someone’s got a computer problem and he hears about it, he is, like, sitting down at your desk fixing it,” Neugebauer said. “That’s the one thing I always tell the staff: If your computer’s not working, do not tell him!”

Issa (pronounced “Ice-uh”) is fifty-seven years old and six feet tall, with a prominent nose and ink-black hair neatly parted on one side. He was giving a tour of his suite to two Republican congressmen and was in an adjoining room directing their attention to the ceiling. In each office, Issa has removed several ceiling tiles and replaced them with plastic panels depicting blue sky and wispy clouds, making you feel as if you were inside a Super Mario Bros. game. Next, he showed his visitors an alcove that had once been stuffed with filing cabinets. He told about a long-running battle he’d had with the Architect of the Capitol, who refused to allow him to remove the cabinets. Fed up with the bureaucracy, he simply instructed his staff to take them out, adding precious workspace. New members of Congress make pilgrimages to Issa’s office to see his modifications. He’s become something like the Martha Stewart of the Republican Party.

He pointed to a row of old filing cabinets hidden behind a curtain that he had not yet managed to take out. “Why?” one of the congressmen asked incredulously. Issa shook his head and began detailing a complicated clash involving sprinklers and a fire-code regulation.

The three men moved into Issa’s personal office, where Issa had chosen and arranged every piece of furniture and bit of décor. On one wall were sixteen framed patents under Issa’s name from his time as a car-alarm manufacturer, in the eighties and nineties. “Advanced embedded codehopping system having masterfixed code encryption,” one said. On the opposite wall, there was a silver-framed portrait of his paternal grandfather, who was born in Lebanon. Nearby hung an oil painting by the artist Andy Thomas depicting eight Republican Presidents sitting around a table playing poker. In another corner, a similar painting by the same artist showed eight Democrats. Issa pointed to the Presidents. “My committee’s job is to trust no Administration,” he said.

Next up was a glass case in which dozens of military coins were displayed, each bearing the insignia of a different unit of the armed forces. Issa pulled a coin out of a desk drawer, prompting one of the other congressmen to take a coin from his pocket. “Oh, very nice! Yours is bigger than mine!” Issa said. The three men laughed. “I don’t know why people think size doesn’t matter!”

Issa’s scheduler entered the room and broke up the fun. “We’re behind schedule, I’m sorry,” she announced. Issa called out after the departing congressmen, “You can have your office just like mine, but you can’t have my office!”

Darrell Edward Issa grew up outside Cleveland, the second of six children. “Cleveland’s a great place when you’re a kid,” he likes to joke. “You hardly ever get sunburned, without the sun shining.” His mother was a Mormon and his father, who was Eastern Orthodox, worked as a truck salesman. The big event of his youth was moving from a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house in an ethnically Hungarian and Italian suburb to a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house in the predominantly Jewish suburb of Cleveland Heights. “You just can’t have eight people in one john,” he said. “I grew up working for a rabbi, in a Jewish Boy Scout group, in which the services were on Saturdays, going to bar mitzvahs galore, learning that gefilte fish ain’t all that good, and being immersed in that society and not really thinking of myself, defining myself, as an Arab. We defined ourselves as: ‘Hey, we’re like Danny Thomas, we’re Lebanese.’ ”

In 1970, on his seventeenth birthday, Issa dropped out of high school and enlisted in the Army. He has said that he had high test scores, which led to an offer to join an explosive-ordnance-disposal unit. “They showed us this movie about taking apart bombs in World War Two,” he told me. “And they gave you this rah-rah speech and said, ‘Wouldn’t you like to sign up for E.O.D.?’ ” After interviewing Issa in 1990, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported that his E.O.D. unit had provided security for President Richard Nixon and had swept the stadium for bombs when Nixon attended a game of the 1971 Pirates-Orioles World Series.

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In 1972, Issa’s father suffered a heart attack, and the Army granted Issa a hardship discharge. He earned a G.E.D. and enrolled in Siena Heights University, a small college in Adrian, Michigan. He transferred to Kent State, where he was a member of the campus R.O.T.C. This was a “pivotal point in Darrell’s history,” his older brother, William, said. “The marked leftist bent by a portion of the student body may have helped further define his already formed conservative perspective.” After graduating, he returned to the Army, which moved him to different bases around the country. He served until 1980, when he was stationed at Fort Ord, in Monterey, California. During one of his political campaigns, he said that he received the “highest possible” ratings while in the Army.

During this period, Issa married his college sweetheart, Marcia Enyart, but the union didn’t last. When he returned to civilian life, he remarried. He met his second wife, Kathy Stanton, when she locked her keys inside her apartment and Issa, who lived next door, gallantly scaled a balcony and broke into her place. “He was in within thirty seconds,” Kathy recalled. “I had to go out with him after that.” The couple bought into a small company run by a friend of Issa’s from the Boy Scouts, and they moved from California to Cleveland. In a 1998 campaign ad, Issa said that the investment comprised “our life savings of seven thousand dollars.”

The company, Quantum Enterprises, assembled electronics such as bug zappers, FM power boosters, and CB radio parts for other companies. It was struggling when Issa made his investment, but not as badly as one of its clients, Steal Stopper International, which made car alarms. Issa acquired Steal Stopper in February, 1982, began to run the company himself, and turned it around. That year, he sold two hundred thousand car alarms to Ford, and was planning to sell Ford a million the following year. He also was negotiating a major contract with Toyota.

At 2:35 A.M. on September 7, 1982, the phone rang in Issa’s house. The Quantum and Steal Stopper office and factory was on fire. Issa got dressed and drove the seven miles from his house, in Oakwood Village, to his workplace, in Maple Heights. He arrived by 3 A.M., to find blue flames shooting from holes in the roof. Four fire engines, a helicopter, and forty-three firefighters from three departments responded to the alarm. When the firemen entered the building, they encountered black smoke so thick they couldn’t see their hands in front of their faces. The fire took three hours to bring under control.

A lieutenant in the Maple Heights Fire Department noted in his incident report that the “cause of this fire appears to be electrical.” The fire had started at a workbench where light bulbs for bug zappers were tested. Almost everything of value was gone. Fortunately for Issa, he had recently increased his fire insurance.

Within months, he had opened the business at a new location nearby. The United States was entering a decade-long surge in auto thefts, the Steal Stopper line took off, and Issa signed deals with BMW, Rolls-Royce, General Motors, and other major car manufacturers. In 1985, he sold his company to a California firm that made home alarm systems, and he moved to San Diego to work for the new entity. Soon afterward, he left to start another car-alarm company, called Directed Electronics, Inc. D.E.I. shared Issa’s initials and his voice, which he recorded for the company’s signature product, the Viper, an alarm that warns potential car thieves (as well as passing trucks and bursts of wind), “Please step away from the car.”

Issa, who still owns a stake in the company through a family foundation, can recall his exact sales figures from the era. “In 1985, we did about a million dollars,” he said. “In 1986, we did $2.1 million; in 1987, we did $2.7 million. The next year, 1988, we did seven million. And then about fourteen in 1989. We got up to about one hundred million. The company does about two hundred and twenty million dollars now.”

In 1994, according to one version of Issa’s official biography, he “received Inc. Magazine’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award.” He began to work with consumer-electronics trade associations, made trips to Washington to lobby for the industry, and started to get involved in politics. In an increasingly Democratic state, he soon became one of the biggest donors to Republicans. He helped fund Proposition 209, a 1996 ballot initiative that would ban affirmative action in public institutions. It passed with fifty-five per cent of the vote. He helped bring the Republican Convention to San Diego in 1996 and got to know the Party leaders. “It was an evolution of involvement,” Issa told me.

In 1997, he decided to run for the United States Senate. His impressive background—working-class high-school dropout, Army officer who helped protect the President, and self-made high-tech tycoon interested in law and order—helped him attract some of the best campaign operatives in California. He started out by spending two million dollars on radio ads. One of the first declared, “Sometimes people mispronounce his name, but, once you get to know Darrell Issa, you discover this is a life with more great chapters yet to be written.”

Issa didn’t even win the Republican primary. Although he outspent his main opponent, Matt Fong, the state treasurer, by some nine million dollars, he lost by five points. His campaign fell apart after a burst of investigative reporting raised serious questions about his honesty and his past. Many politicians have committed indiscretions in earlier years: maybe they had an affair or hired an illegal immigrant as a nanny. Issa, it turned out, had, among other things, been indicted for stealing a car, arrested for carrying a concealed weapon, and accused by former associates of burning down a building.

In May of 1998, Lance Williams, of the San Francisco Examiner, reported that Issa had not always received the “highest possible” ratings in the Army. In fact, at one point he “received unsatisfactory conduct and efficiency ratings and was transferred to a supply depot.” Williams also discovered that Issa didn’t provide security for Nixon at the 1971 World Series, because Nixon didn’t attend any of the games.

A member of Issa’s Army unit, Jay Bergey, told Williams that his most vivid recollection of the young Issa was that in December, 1971, Issa stole his car, a yellow Dodge Charger. “I confronted Issa,” Bergey said in 1998. “I got in his face and threatened to kill him, and magically my car reappeared the next day, abandoned on the turnpike.”

Bergey died of lung cancer in 2002, but his widow, Joyce, recently said to me that she remembered her husband telling the story of the stolen Dodge Charger. She laughed when she heard that Issa is now a prominent member of Congress. “Well, he probably figured he was borrowing it from a friend,” she said. “But now we’re discussing politicians, so we all know how honest they are. When I meet a good one, I’ll let you know.”

On March 15, 1972, three months after Issa allegedly stole Jay Bergey’s car and one month after he left the Army for the first time, Ohio police arrested Issa and his older brother, William, and charged them with stealing a red Maserati from a Cleveland showroom. The judge eventually dismissed the case.

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While the Maserati case was pending, Issa went to college. Just before 11 P.M. on Friday, December 1, 1972, two police officers on patrol in the small town of Adrian noticed Issa driving a yellow Volkswagen the wrong way down a one-way street. The police pulled him over, and, as Issa retrieved the car registration, an officer saw something peculiar in the glove compartment. He searched it, and, according to the police report, found a .25-calibre Colt automatic inside a box of ammunition, along with a “military pouch” that contained “44 rounds of ammo and a tear gas gun and two rounds of ammo for it.” Issa was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. The policeman asked why he was armed. “He stated in Ohio you could carry a gun as long as you had a justifiable reason,” the report said. “His justifiable reason was for his car’s protection and his.” Issa pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of possession of an unregistered gun. He paid a small fine and was sentenced to six months’ probation.