VELSHI: I want to bring you up to speed with what's going on at Toyota. A lot of people have been wondering whether Toyota knew that it had a problem and was deliberately keeping that from the public, or whether they just didn't realize how serious this problem was with their -- their accelerators. Well, some new internal documents show that Toyota knew about its unintended acceleration problem and some causes years before it warned the public via recall. This information was submitted to the National Highway Traffic -- Highway Transportation Safety Administration, NHTSA as we know it. Then there's this e-mail from a U.S. Toyota executive, who has since retired, who was urging more transparency, just as his bosses were headed to Washington to talk to government officials. In January, on January 16, Irv Miller, who is a former group vice president for Toyota, sent an e-mail to say, "We are not protecting our customers by keeping this quiet. The time to hide on this one is over. We need to come clean." Toyota's been keeping pretty quiet on this one but in a statement admitted it did a poor job of communicating. That's actually not a poor job of communicating. The issue here is whether or not they knew something and were lying. And you can be sure that we'll be on top of that. And so is everybody else who's following this very, very closely. All right. The other thing we need to think about is this financial meltdown that caused the recession that we are hopefully exiting or have exited right now. Could it have been prevented? That's the question that will be lingering over our heads, no matter how much we recover. It's a question we're going to get into with Christine Romans straight ahead. She's standing by.
Internal Documents Raise New Questions about Toyota Recall