Bernanke and Geithner, did they deliberately mis-inform Congress?

From a story in Bloomberg today

Fed Made Taxpayers Unwitting Junk-Bond Buyers
By Caroline Salas, Craig Torres and Shannon D. Harrington - Jul 1, 2010

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and then-New York Fed President Timothy Geithner told senators on April 3, 2008, that the tens of billions of dollars in “assets” the government agreed to purchase in the rescue of Bear Stearns Cos. were “investment-grade.” They didn’t share everything the Fed knew about the money.

“Either the Fed did not understand the distressed state of some of the assets that it was purchasing from banks and is only now discovering their true value, or it understood that it was buying weak assets and attempted to obscure that fact,” Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat and member of the Senate Banking Committee, said in an e-mail when informed about the credit quality of holdings in the Maiden Lane LLC portfolio. The committee held the April 3 hearing.

If "the Fed did not understand the distressed state of some of the assets that it was purchasing from banks.." then we are allowing incompetent entities and disingenuous people to write rules and spend taxpayer money on another scam perpetrated on we the people by the smartest manipulators on earth.