Solyndra Scandal Hits Obama White House

Two weeks ago, alternative energy company Solyndra, which received $535 million in “stimulus” loan guarantees from the Obama administration, collapsed. Solyndra was the poster child for the Obama administration’s claim that it could create green jobs with taxpayer money. Now 1,100 more people are out of work and American taxpayers are on the hook for half a billion dollars.

But while this ought to be an abject embarrassment for the dirigistes in the Obama administration, there’s a much bigger story behind the Solyndra scandal. It involves a concerted effort by White House officials to improperly rush the Solyndra loan decision for political reasons.

The Washington Post had the exclusive story:

The Obama White House tried to rush federal reviewers for a decision on a nearly half-billion-dollar loan to the solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra so Vice President Biden could announce the approval at a September 2009 groundbreaking for the company’s factory, newly obtained e-mails show.

The Silicon Valley company, a centerpiece in President Obama’s initiative to develop clean energy technologies, had been tentatively approved for the loan by the Energy Department but was awaiting a final financial review by the Office of Management and Budget.

The August 2009 e-mails, released exclusively to The Washington Post, show White House officials repeatedly asking OMB reviewers when they would be able to decide on the federal loan and noting a looming press event at which they planned to announce the deal. In response, OMB officials expressed concern that they were being rushed to approve the company’s project without adequate time to assess the risk to taxpayers, according to information provided by Republican congressional investigators.

The Post goes on to detail some of these email messages. Here’s one of them:

“We have ended up with a situation of having to do rushed approvals on a couple of occasions (and we are worried about Solyndra at the end of the week),” one official wrote. That Aug. 31, 2009, message, written by a senior OMB staffer and sent to Terrell P. McSweeny, Biden’s domestic policy adviser, concluded, “We would prefer to have sufficient time to do our due diligence reviews.”

Now here’s where mere incompetence turns into corruption. Want to guess the name of Solyndra’s biggest financial backer? Tulsa billionaire and Obama fundraiser George Kaiser.

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