By John Ransom
6/1/2012
With the presidential campaign in full gear, expect Darrell Issa (R-CA), chairman of the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform to expand his public probe of the Obama administration’s green crony program that included risky loans to below-investment-grade companies like now-bankrupt Solyndra.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) yesterday released a devastating 22-page report on the green company scam formerly known as Solyndra.
The report contains hundreds of cited quotes charging the Obama administration with corruption, mismanagement, evasion of responsibility and outright fraud in connection with government-backed loans to the company even as Solyndra slid into bankruptcy.
The issuance of the report by the RNC is not coincidental. It’s another sign of how the GOP expects to sap and mine the foundations of Obama’s administration throughout the summer, hammering the message home that you just can’t trust Obama to manage anything without it becoming political, reckless and wasteful.
When conservatives have complained to me that Congress has done too little to educate the public about the corruption and mismanagement in the Obama administration, I have counseled them to just wait until summer.
Hearings conducted on the subject last fall were just a warm up. Now that the election looms, watch out.
Recovery Summer?
No.
Let’s just call it Discovery Summer, as in “Here’s your subpoena, better bring your lawyer too.”
Among the most serious of the charges made by the RNC and Issa are those of influence peddling to top donors including “Oklahoma billionaire George Kaiser, who bundled between $50,000 and $100,000 for Obama’s 2008 campaign, [and] was one of Solyndra’s lead investors,” according to OpenSecrets.org.
Kaiser in fact made 16 trips to the White House according to the RNC’s report.
Indeed, other Obama pals seemed to make out just as well at your expense.
Writes author Peter Schweizer of the Hoover Institution for Newsweek:
[A] large proportion of the winners [in Obama’s green company scam] were companies with Obama-campaign connections. Indeed, at least 10 members of Obama’s finance committee and more than a dozen of his campaign bundlers were big winners in getting your money. At the same time, several politicians who supported Obama managed to strike gold by launching alternative-energy companies and obtaining grants. How much did they get? According to the Department of Energy’s own numbers ... a lot. In the 1705 government-backed-loan program, for example, $16.4 billion of the $20.5 billion in loans granted as of Sept. 15 went to companies either run by or primarily owned by Obama financial backers—individuals who were bundlers, members of Obama’s National Finance Committee, or large donors to the Democratic Party.
Last month, at a hearing conducted by Issa, it was discovered that First Solar chairman Michael Ahearn sold $450 million of his own company’s stock while gorging his company, First Solar, at Obama’s all-you-can-eat green money buffet.
From the Western Center for Journalism:
As the Heritage investigative blog The Scribe reported earlier this week, Issa and company have sent a letter to Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar to once again request “information on federal support for six different companies: Abengoa Solar, BrightSource Energy, First Solar, Nevada Geothermal, NextEra Energy Resources, and SolarReserve.”
The letter gives a clue as to where the committee will concentrate its fire.
According to Heritage, one GOP aide thinks that the administration “has created a two-tiered system for energy companies looking to secure federal support. ‘Politically favored, and often connected, renewable energy plans [receive] less rigorous review than traditional energy projects,’” when reviewed inside the Department of the Interior.
If those allegations are true and Issa can demonstrate that through public hearings this summer, expect the subpoenas to come from Issa fast and furiously over the summer and into the fall.
It’s increasingly likely that the GOP will have the active support of Bill Clinton’s Democrat Party, which would like nothing more than pulling the wings off The Amateur.
Download the GOP report on Solyndra here.
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To read another article by John Ransom, click here.
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