Andrew Stiles reports for National Review Online about the mounting evidence of the Obama administration’s role in the decision to award a $535 million loan guarantee to the now-failed Solyndra venture.
President Obama has continued to defend the ill-fated Solyndra loan guarantee. “Hindsight is always 20/20,” he told George Stephanopoulos in a recent interview. “It went through the regular review process and people felt that it was a good bet.”
Yet the committee continues to unearth e-mails suggesting that the White House played an unusually aggressive role in the “regular review process” and that quite of few people in the administration felt that Solyndra was a decidedly bad bet.
The GOP investigation has already led to the resignation of Jonathan Silver, the head of the DOE loans programs, and Friday’s hearing will certainly not be the last of its kind. Committee Republicans are determined to keep up the pressure.
“The paper trail released by the White House portrays a disturbingly close relationship between President Obama’s West Wing inner circle, campaign donors, and the wealthy investors who spawned the Solyndra mess,” Reps. Fred Upton (R., Mich.), chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and Cliff Stearns (R., Fla.) chairman of the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee, said in a statement. “If Solyndra is evidence of Obama’s regular review process, then we have significant problems.”