President Obama never tires of claiming credit for saving Detroit’s auto industry with his $80 billion bailout in 2009, especially when he’s on the campaign trail in electoral battleground states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

But when a congressional committee summons three of the men Obama appointed to his Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry to design and carry out that bailout, they suddenly come down with a terminal case of lockjaw, so tight that it brings to mind the Mafia’s code of silence, the Omerta.