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White House delivers Solyndra documents, rebuffs full GOP subpoena
The White House on Friday rejected House Republicans’ subpoena for all internal communications related to the $535 million Solyndra loan guarantee, instead providing 135 pages of documents that administration officials say meet the “legitimate oversight interests” of congressional investigators.
In a letter to top Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee Friday, White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler said the documents “do not contain evidence of favoritism to political supporters or any wrongdoing by the White House in connection with the Solyndra loan guarantee.”
An administration official said the documents offer little new insight into the loan guarantee to the failed solar panel maker.
“The Bottom line: No news here. It’s the same stuff you’ve seen before,” the administration officials said. “There’s no evidence of any wrongdoing.”
The White House sent the committee documents Friday afternoon that fall into four categories.
The categories include: Whether campaign contributions influenced the decision to grant the Solyndra loan guarantee; White House involvement in the decision to offer conditional and final approval of the loan guarantee; and involvement by the White House to restructure the loan in February in such a way that ensure private investors would be repaid before the taxpayer if Solyndra went under.
The White House withheld about a dozen pages of documents related to the restructuring of the loan guarantee “because of the deliberative nature of the communications.” Ruemmler offered to make the documents available to committee staff for review.
Ruemmler said the White House is cooperating with the investigation. But she also blasted Republicans for issuing such a broad subpoena.
“[W]e continue to have serious concerns about the unnecessary burdens and institutional encroachment on the White House imposed by the Committee’s approach to this investigation,” she said.
The breadth of the subpoena, White House officials have said, would have presented a major logistical hurdle for staff, who would have been required to provide every document that mentioned the California solar panel maker.
Ruemmler said in the letter that the counsel’s office chose not to provide news stories and press releases related to Solyndra. Nor did they provide other documents that did not fall into the four categories.
The subpoena, which Republicans sent to the White House late last week, asks for "all documents referring or relating in any way to the $535 million loan guarantee issued to Solyndra, Inc., by the Department of Energy."
The White House delivered the documents to the committee one day after the Thursday deadline outlined in the subpoena.
Republicans on the committee’s investigative panel voted to subpoena the White House a day after Ruemmler offered to provide documents if lawmakers agreed to narrow the scope of the subpoena.
“Despite our efforts to engage in a serious discussion of accommodation, the committee refused to work with us in good faith to narrow its requests to focus on the Committee’s legitimate oversight interests,” Ruemmler said in the letter. “Indeed, the committee rejected our concrete proposal without explanation.”
In total, the Obama administration has provided about 185,000 pages of documents to the committee. That number includes 100,000 pages of documents provided by the Energy Department this week.
The documents that have been made public do not show evidence of political favoritism by the administration.
But a series of emails released by Republicans show that the White House pressed administration officials to make a swift decision on helping Solyndra. They also show that there was disagreement within the administration on the wisdom of approving the loan guarantee.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu is slated to appear before the committee’s investigative panel next week.
Campaign adviser wanted Chu replaced
Included among the documents is an email from Dan Carol, research
director for President Obama’s 2008 election campaign. In a lengthy
message, Carol calls on top White House officials to oust Chu.
“Speaking personally and on no one’s behalf noted below, I strongly
believe that Secretary Chu (as noted below) should step aside to focus
on long term R&D and fix the very-broken DOE federal labs – serving
as a new DOE Chief Scientist or perhaps as the new head of OSTP,” Carol
said in a March 2011 email.
But Pete Rouse, a top adviser to Obama, rejected Carol’s call for Chu to
step down, while also asking other White House officials if the
president should focus more on energy.
“I’m not interested in Dan’s criticism of Secretary Chu, but what do you
think of Dan’s general assessment of the need for greater focus on our
energy policy agenda?” Rouse wrote in March 2011. “Dan is a clean energy
activist who has a clear point of view and is pushing his particular
agenda. Nonetheless he is smart and reflects the President’s general
philosophy on energy policy.”
Emails show White House rebuts links between Obama visit, donor
The new emails released Friday provide an inside view of White House planning for the finalization of the Solyndra loan guarantee in September of 2009.
The finalization was announced at Solyndra's operations in Fremont, California and Vice President Joe Biden appeared at the event via satellite.
The messages show that at one point in August of 2009 Heather Zichal, a White House energy aide, was said to have concerns that “the funding community has concerns about this.”
Elsewhere, the White House released a message aimed at knocking down GOP allegations that the administration makes clean energy financing decisions to reward donors.
One of the emails, from June of 2011, is from Greg Nelson of the White House Office of Public Engagement to other White House aides.
It discusses an apparently looming Washington Post story about how the White House decides which clean energy companies President Obama visits, including Solyndra, which Obama visited in May of 2010.
The email from Nelson notes that the Post reporter seemed to be “inferring” that the White House rewards places that have investors that are large donors or that lobby for Obama to visit.
Nelson, in the message, says he emphasized that there’s no link.
“At no time do we look at donor history, and in fact many of the CEOs and companies we visit volunteer that they are Republican (one of the sites in WI POTUS visited has a self-described ‘tea-party sympathizing CEO’), but all were happy for the opportunity to be highlighted,” the email from Nelson, the public engagement office’s deputy director, states.
Republicans have for months been highlighting the fact that Solyndra investor George Kaiser was a major Obama fundraiser.
Ben Geman contributed
This post was updated at 5:59 p.m. and 6:29 p.m.
