Solyndra Gets Better By The Day

If one wrote the Solyndra story it could not get any better than it is becoming. In fact, many people would not believe it as it would be too outrageous. Conspiracy against the taxpayers conducted by the highest levels of the government involving rewarding contributors and guaranteeing loans for them.  Wow, what a story. Where are our friends at Occupy Wall Street? Oh, I forget, President Obama is one of their friends and they would not want him to look bad. They are only going after the really bad people who provide jobs to millions!

If the following story about the email links the White House has finally turned over to Congress does not disgust you, nothing will. If this story turns out to be accurate, the abuse of power and the cover-up on this should result in charges for many in the West Wing as well as the well-heeled donors who also were involved.  We will see what happens.

E-mails Link Solyndra Investors, Campaign Donors and White House

by  Jason Mattera

10/11/2011

Friday night dumps at the White House.

Now that’s something the Occupy Wall Street mob could rally against.  But instead thelowlifes are defecating on police vehicles, sporting nasty-looking coke nails on camera, mindlessly chanting whatever their organizers are telling them to, slamming their palms on Conga drums, scouring lower Manhattan for sex and free food, and fantasizing about what an absolute treat it would be to call Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela home.

Last Friday night, the White House released a treasure trove of e-mails that only stoke the flames of the Solyndra demise.  You know, that failed green energy company that blew through $535 million of taxpayer dollars, an incident that Obama said he doesn’t regret.

Before we get to the latest Solyndra scandal involving the most honest, transparent and ethical administration in the history of the universe, how about a quick recap of the facts?

First we have the billionaire George Kaiser, an Obama fund-raiser and Solyndra investor, who made multiple visits to the White House before the solar panel company was granted the $535 million in taxpayer money.  The White House says that Kaiser didn’t lobby them on the loan approval, but we’ll never know, because the meeting wasn’t done in public for all to see.  The administration’s denial seems all the more incredulous considering that Kaiser himself is on record bragging about how he helped secure funding for Oklahoma projects through the gargantuan stimulus program.

Second, we know that the Office of Management and Budget was concerned that Solyndra wasn’t ready for prime time, and therefore didn’t want to be rushed to sanction the government loan.  Those concerns fell on deaf ears, however, because Solyndra was more about a political victory, not an economic one, for Team Obama.

And now this:  Another Obama bundler, Steve Skinner, was improperly lobbying for Solyndra to get the half a billion dollars in taxpayer money.  The lobbying was improper because his wife, Allison Spinner, worked for the law firm representing Solyndra.

“How hard is this?  What is he waiting for?” complained Spinner, who raised $500,000 for Obama, in an internal e-mail while working for the Department of Energy.  “I have OVP [the Office of the Vice President] and WH [the White House] breathing down my neck on this.”  Spinner was agitated that process was taking too long. Later on he asked a DOE colleague, “Any word on OMB? Solyndra's getting nervous.”

Naturally, Spinner’s wife’s law office denies that she had any involvement in representing the now-bankrupt solar panel company, which we’ll really never know.  They just want us to take their word for it.  What we do know is that Solyndra paid the law firm, Wilson Sonsini, more than $2 million in legal fees for securing the loan.

Looks like the Spinner household had an early Christmas in 2009, eh?

“After eight months of stonewalling by this administration, today we finally learn one of the reasons why they fought our investigation every step of the way,” said Rep. Fred Upton (R.-Mich.), the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee.  “The paper trail released by the White House portrays a disturbingly close relationship between President Obama's West Wing inner circle, campaign donors, and wealthy investors that spawned the Solyndra mess.”

But there’s more.

Turns out that the in the latest flurry of e-mails released by the White House show that the Energy Department restructured Solyndra’s loans to protect private investors, not taxpayers.  “When Department of Energy restructured the loan in February, they inexplicably not only doubled-down on a bad bet, they put Solyndra’s investors, Argonaut and Madrone to the front of the line for the first $75 million that could be recouped in bankruptcy,” a GOP official on the House Energy and Commerce Committee told HUMAN EVENTS.

And that restructuring could very well have been illegal.

At the time that the Department of Energy (DOE) was flirting with the refinancing, the Treasury Department notified told it to consult the Justice Department to make sure that the terms of the new loan were in fact legal, to ensure that it didn’t violate the “Repayment” section of the Energy Policy Act of 2005.  In that section, the secretary of the Energy Department must follow specific protocols before shelling out taxpayer money on loan guarantees.

It looks those protocols were never obeyed.  “In February, we requested in writing that DOE seek the Department of Justice’s approval of any proposed restructuring.  To our knowledge, that has never happened,” wrote Department of the Treasury Assistant Secretary for Financial Markets Mary J. Miller in August of this year.

The next hearing on Solyndra is scheduled for this Friday in the House’s Energy and Commerce Committee.  That’s a good place for the “Occupy” thugs to show up and stand in “solidarity” with Rep. Upton against this administration’s corporate cronyism and potentially illegal use of taxpayer money.

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Mr. Mattera is the editor of HUMAN EVENTS and the author of Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation (Simon & Schuster). He also hostsThe Jason Mattera Show on News Talk Radio 77WABC. Previously, he was the Spokesman for Young America's Foundation and a TV correspondent for Michelle Malkin. Follow Jason on  Twitter, Facebook, and  YouTube.