When members of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission testified before the House Financial Services Committee Wednesday, criticism of the investigation itself overshadowed any new concrete conclusions.

The 10-member FCIC released its final report in January detailing the events that led up to the financial crisis and concluded that both Wall Street players and their Washington regulators missed opportunities to prevent the meltdown. But the commission was split along partisan lines.

The six Democrats on the commission voted in support of the official report. Three Republicans filed their dissent, pointing to international and macroeconomic factors, while a fourth Republican Peter Wallison blamed U.S. housing policy for spurring the bubble and its ultimate burst.

Bill Thomas, vice chairman of the FCIC and one of the authors of the dissent, said the investigation was flawed from the outset.

"From the beginning, I thought that the commission was created for political purposes, with a partisan structure and a partisan 22-point agenda," Thomas said. "It called for six of us to be appointed by Democrats and four by Republicans, and only six votes were needed to transmit the report to the president and the Congress — the math was simple."

But Wallison was more exact in his criticism. He accused the commission of not determining the issues it would explore. Rather, a list of issues for the public hearings was handed to them from subprime lending to "too-big-to fail."

Then, Wallison said the commission outright ignored research from Edward Pinto, a colleague of his at the American Enterprise Institute, who studied 27 million subprime and high-risk mortgages, and documented efforts of the Department of Housing and Urban Development's role in reducing underwriting standards to promote homeownership.

"Pinto’s research was never made available to the other members of the FCIC, or even to the commissioners who were members of the subcommittee charged with considering the role of housing policy in the financial crisis," Wallison said in his testimony.

Phil Angelides, chairman of the FCIC, was charged with defending the alleged flaws in the report. He said that, indeed, Pinto's research was provided in the final report and to other commissioners and attempted to downplay the disagreements. The Center for American Progress called Pinto's report false and pointed out that it relied on a "radically revised" definition of subprime and Alt-A loans. Pinto did not immediately reply to requests for comment by HousingWire.

"While commissioners were not unanimous on all issues or on the emphasis we placed on key causes of the crisis, there were, in fact, many areas of agreement," Angelides said. "Importantly, setting aside the conclusions and dissents, this report contains a valuable and accurate historical account of the events leading up to the crisis and the crisis itself."

Many commentators and lawmakers raised question of the need for such a report, pointing out that Dodd-Frank, the government's legislative response to the crisis, was passed and signed months ago. But they ignored the work continuing to be done by regulators charged to write hundreds of new rules under Dodd-Frank.

Rep. Maxine Waters (R-Calif.) even charged the dissenters of the FCIC report for working against that legislation.

"Those who work to rewrite the causes of the financial crisis undermine Dodd-Frank," Waters said.

Thomas said that the commission's work shed light on a number of problems in the financial markets that were not addressed in the legislation, while Angelides said the report would act as a "guidepost" for future actions from Washington. Wallison said reform to housing policy should have taken precedence.

And so even on what Congress should do going forward, the commission could not agree.

Write to Jon Prior.

Follow him on Twitter: @JonAPrior