White House agrees to hand over Solyndra documents to GOP

By Andrew Restuccia - 11/10/11 04:37 PM ET

The White House agreed Thursday to provide House lawmakers with internal communications related to the $535 million Solyndra loan guarantee, Republicans said.

The agreement comes a week after Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s investigative panel subpoenaed the White House for all internal communications on Solyndra, the solar panel maker that filed for bankruptcy in September. The deadline for producing the requested documents was Thursday.

The White House had balked at the subpoena, arguing it is too broad. White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler told committee lawmakers that she would provide documents if Republicans narrowed their request.

Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), the chairman of the committee's investigative panel, said Thursday that the White House agreed to provide documents. But they offered no detail on whether the White House agreed to provide all internal communications, as the subpoena requested, or if they will provide documents in a narrow set of categories.

“This morning, the White House counsel’s office informed the committee that it plans to begin providing responsive materials to the committee's subpoena,” the Republicans lawmakers said in a statement. “As we have said before, we stand ready to work with the White House on its document production and believe it is entirely possible for the White House to produce information for an investigation that the White House counsel herself has acknowledged is both legitimate and necessary.

“We remain hopeful that the White House will demonstrate some good-faith efforts of compliance and provide the internal Solyndra-related communications we have been seeking.”

White House spokesman Eric Schultz said Thursday that officials plan to comply with "legitimate oversight requests."

"We are continuing to work with the Committee to accommodate legitimate oversight requests and will provide a response to the Committee tomorrow," Schultz said in a statement, arguing that the administration has been "diligent in responding to this Congressional oversight investigation."

Republicans have pounced on the Solyndra bankruptcy, raising questions about President Obama’s green agenda and alleging that politics played a role in the approval of the loan guarantee.

The committee’s investigation — which has uncovered more than 80,000 pages of administration documents — has found no evidence that the decisions to approve the loan guarantee and restructure the financing in February were influenced by politics.

This story was updated at 5:27 p.m.