MELISSA BLOCK, Host: But there's a problem, says senior news analyst Daniel Schorr. Many of the politicians now accepting Toyota's apologies have also, for years, been accepting its money.</s>DANIEL SCHORR: What did Toyota hope to gain from its friendly investment in the American Congress? According to a document obtained by the Detroit News, Yoshimi Inaba, Toyota's North American president, boasted in 2009 that he had negotiated an agreement with auto-safety regulators that saved more than $100 million by preventing a large scale recall of some of the Toyota models in 2007. No defect found, wrote Inaba.</s>W: This is Daniel Schorr.</s>ROBERT SIEGEL, Host: This is NPR.
More than 40 percent of the members of Congress investigating Toyota have received campaign donations from the company, according to research by The Washington Post. NPR Senior News Analyst Dan Schorr says it's another example of the problematic relationship between corporate lobbyists and elected representatives.