Emails released late Thursday night show that officials in the White House were privately very concerned over the viability of Solyndra even as they publicly declared the solar panel manufacturer was in good shape.
“The optics of a Solyndra default will be bad,” an official from the Office of Management and Budget wrote in a Jan. 31 email to a senior OMB official. “The timing will likely coincide with the 2012 campaign season heating up.”
One would hope that an official in OMB would be more concerned that the federal government had just wasted $535 million on the now-bankrupt “green jobs” company, but instead the e-mails reveal ongoing discussions over the political aspects of the doomed venture. Additional e-mails show that as early as May 2010, right before President Obama’s famous photo-op at the Solyndra headquarters, White House officials were ignoring and downplaying industry reports that Solyndra was in trouble.
Emails obtained by The Associated Press show that a White House official dismissed reports about Solyndra’s gloomy future. An email from Greg Nelson, a White House official who had been involved in the planning of Obama’s May 2010 trip to Solyndra’s headquarters, to a Solyndra executive downplayed a July 2010 news story in a trade publication that criticized the company’s financial health.
“Seems B.S.,” Nelson wrote.
Mr. Nelson works in the White House Office of Public Engagement headed by close Obama adviser Valerie Jarret. Mr. Nelson’s background is in the “green jobs” industry as he is the CEO and founder of Green Harvest Technologies, an applications and marketing company that developed a line of “clean and green” consumer products using bio-based plastics and fibers. There is no indication that Mr. Nelson is an expert in the solar panel industry and it is unclear at this time how he reached his profound judgement of the financial status of Solyndra.
The concerns at the White House and the OMB revealed in tonight’s e-mails obtained by the Associated Press seem to contradict earlier reports that the White House did not know that there were financial concerns with Solyndra.
Obama’s Energy Department bypassed required steps for funding awards to five of 10 applicants that received conditional loan guarantees according to a July 2010 report from the Government Accountability Office. According to Congressional sources Solyndra was one of those companies.
This is just the latest revelation in the growing Solyndra scandal that includes a major fundraiser for the Obama for President campaign, George Kaiser, serving as a major investor in Solyndra. Weeks after President Obama was sworn in, the loan guarantee for Solyndra, that had been halted by the Bush Dept. of Energy, was re-started and fast-tracked. Mr. Kaiser made frequent trips to the White House in the days leading up to the announcement of the stimulus fund loan guarantee.
Earlier today during the daily White House briefing, Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters that President Obama had not been briefed on the Solyndra affair.
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