The logic is that pressure was exerted by the WH to push the loan through. It’s been under investigation since February and the light of day is just now starting to hit the news. The loan was made when it was clear that the company was in deep trouble. According to the ABC videos linked above the entire loan program was fiercely debated in the WH.
The loan should never have been made and the DOE emails paint a very bad picture. “The issue of working capital remains unresolved” Aug 20, 2009 e-mail between DOE staffers weeks before the loan approval. memo from the same day: “the model runs out of cash in Sept. 2011”. The company declared bankruptcy Sept 2011 so the DOE’s model was spot on.
Email from Senior WH staff to the DOE: if there is any way to accelerate, would give a lot of peace of mind/flexibility on that front" Aug. 31, 2009. But a WH budget analyst complained: “We would prefer to have sufficient time to do our due diligence reviews… and have the approval set the date for the announcement rather than the other way around” Aug. 31, 2009 email from OMB to Vice President’s aide.
Connecting more of the dots… same article posted above: Spinner also wrote an email two weeks before the Solyndra loan closed to an aide to Vice President Biden, identifying the private investors in the deal. He attached to the email a bio from Forbes Magazine of George Kaiser, an Oklahoma billionaire who raised up to $100,000 for Obama’s 2008 campaign.
So what we have is memos to the WH from a major fundraiser outlining Obama supporters who have invested heavily in Solyndra, the WH budget group stating the company will fail exactly when it did, and suggestions from the WH to the DOE that it would be ever so nice if the loan approval was speeded up so they could have a nice soundbite for a pet project.
That’s not a tempest in a teapot, that’s fiduciary malfeasance and potential impeachment material.
Oh, please. There’s definitely some bad stuff out there indicating some persons in the administration may have been pushing this more than they should have, but there is nothing tying Obama directly to it. I don’t expect him to be aware of every e-mail anyone in his administration sends, nor do I expect him to personally oversee the goodness or badness of any given loan such as this one.
It’s one of his administration’s pet projects. It’s a loan that directly props up the investments of his big contributors AND the loan is written in such a way as to favor those investors.
Both the Treasury and Department of Justice objected to it: “In one pointed memo, shortly before the company declared bankruptcy, a top Treasury official wrote to the White House to make clear that the decision to restructure the deal did not have Treasury or Justice Department approval – despite early suggestions that approval from both agencies may be required.”
“To our knowledge, that has never happened,” wrote Mary J. Miller, Treasury’s assistant secretary for financial markets. “While I expect that DOE has a view about why loan subordination can occur without DOJ approval or Treasury consultation, I wanted to correct any impression that we have acquiesced in the steps to date.”
A loan that was predicted to fail was approved under the express suggestion of the WH which in turn is linked to financial supporters of the President.
It’s always easy to go back, after the fact, and find the “geniuses” who predicted failure. What remains to be seen is whether or not the DOE had reasons to disregard the naysayers. And there are always naysayers. Sometimes they’re right, sometimes wrong.
a half billion dollar bad loan to cronies that nobody but the WH was in favor of. That’s a lot of unemployment checks that could have been written starting with Solyndra employees who got their notice when the doors were locked.
And Presidents always have people willing to give him a blowjob. Nothing new there except the number willing to do so in the voting booth.
Really? Tell you what lets do. We print the word “Solyndra” in big type on a sheet of paper. We go to any random place where the most ordinary of people gather…the Piggly Wiggly store, Mall of America, monster truck rally… We show it to people selected at random and ask what it means. You get five bucks for everybody who knows, I get one for everybody who doesn’t. People who back away nervously casting about for the nearest exit, or security…don’t count.
I would take that bet here. This thing is the paper every day. Big front page story today.
But that’s not really the point. As you might know, there’s a lot of money to be spent in the upcoming campaign. A lot of time for this to be flashed in front of the American people, and you don’t even need to get that many people upset about it for it make a dent. It’s still small potatoes, I believe, but it’s going to be part of the drip, drip, drip that the GOP candidate is going to use in his campaign. The fewer the drips, the better for Obama. The more drips, the worse.
What point, exactly, are you trying to counter with this? It looks like the big straw one. And you might recall that there was a time when people had no idea who Monica Lewinsky was. Or Watergate.
ABC broke the story and since the FBI got involved that makes all the emails in the investigation subject to the FOIA.
The WH was involved in a loan their own budget advisers predicted would go bad and it cost the tax payers a half billion dollars. It’s not going away with a wave of the hand. Too many news outlets have picked it up.
It will have a huge impact on people who were not going to vote for him anyway. The Repubs are sounding off like this is Watergate. But they are pretty much talking to each other.
You don’t want to go there Lobohan. The last certificate released was almost entirely airbrushed. There’s virtually nothing original in the document. You can see it in the layering and you can see it in the final results.
I’ve spent the last 15 years enhancing historical documents so they can be read easier. The idea that it was done with OCR software doesn’t account for the inconsistencies in the document. Some of it was redrawn entirely, some of it was darkened/lightened and some of it was blended. It would have been better to just make a copy of it warts and all instead of trying to make it easier to read. It just screams fraud for no good reason.
[QUOTE=CNBC]
In April 2010, one OMB [Office of Management and Budget] staffer emailed to another about what he apparently saw as the woeful state of the Department of Energy’s investments in the solar industry.
“What’s terrifying is that after looking at some of the ones [companies] that came next, this one started to look better,” the official, who was not named in the report, wrote. “Bad days are coming."
[/QUOTE]