There are at least four probes into the ties between the White House and Solyndra. Making sense of Solyndra

Solyndra’s headline-grabbing demise has brought the White House a big PR headache.

But this isn’t Watergate, Iran-Contra or “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” So what is it? Is Solyndra simply a bad $535 million investment from a previously obscure government program that went south? Or a full-blown scandal where senior administration officials are going to end up spending more time with their families (and lawyers)?


The political fallout may be worse than the legal fallout, especially for President Barack Obama’s green agenda.

Most people outside Washington and the Bay Area had probably never heard of Solyndra before FBI agents raided its headquarters and the offices of its top executives earlier this month. Many are still learning the right way to pronounce the company’s name (So-Lin-Drah).

There are at least four investigations running on the legal, political and financial ties between the Obama administration and the California solar company that filed for bankruptcy protection last month.

Now that the first high-profile congressional hearing is over, here’s what to watch for:

What’s in those emails?

Republican staffers on the House Energy and Commerce Committee have been sifting through tens of thousands of pages of internal emails, trying to find evidence Solyndra got special treatment from the White House despite a number of warning signs.

Already, they’ve found messages from White House officials pushing to get the Energy Department and Office of Management and Budget to clear some early hurdles in the loan guarantee so that Obama or Vice President Joe Biden could participate in a big groundbreaking ceremony.

The emails also show the company was privately confiding to the Energy Department that it had some cash problems even as it made upbeat assessments elsewhere.

“This really smells pretty bad,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) said Thursday. “Seeing the documents, they figured that this company was going to be out of cash by September 2011 and it wasn’t ready for prime time. … This is just bad.”

Is there a smoking gun?

At this point, House Republicans say the potential wrongdoing they’ve found centers on how Obama officials skirted a provision in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 when helping restructure Solyndra’s loan earlier this year, citing a clause under which outside financers were not allowed to jump ahead of taxpayers to be paid back in the event of default.

“I think the subordination provision was violated, if it was even looked at,” said Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), who was chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee during the 2005 energy debate.

DOE loan guarantee chief Jonathan Silver faced repeated questions at Wednesday’s House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing from Republicans asking who made the decision inside the administration to restructure the loan without heeding the 2005 law.

The Obama political appointee said DOE and OMB lawyers gave them the green light.

“We work to the fullest of our capabilities … to ensure that these projects are as de-risked as possible,” Silver said. “There are always challenges in investing in innovation.”

Silver also said he didn’t know whether Energy Secretary Steven Chu was aware of the change — a point Republicans are sure to raise when the Nobel Prize winner appears before the panel, perhaps next month.

Some Republicans are also calling for heads to roll, though they’re not saying yet who deserves to go.

“The bottom line is government fusses up and no one seems to take responsibility for this and I think someone should be fired,” said Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), chairman of the Energy and Commerce oversight subpanel.

“I want to see more before I come to that judgment,” Upton said Thursday when asked whether Chu should resign. “I don’t know what Chu knew or didn’t know.”

Is anyone going to jail?



Stay tuned.

FBI agents executed search warrants last week in Fremont, Calif., as part of a joint investigation with the DOE inspector general.

What’s known is the company executives offered plenty of positive spin when they visited earlier this summer with lawmakers, the press and other policymakers. Solyndra spokesman Dave Miller also emailed White House aides suggesting all was going well: “Hopefully, we’ll have a great story to tell toward the end of the year,” he wrote just months before the company went belly up.

“They came in and told us in July that their company was improving, they were on the upswing and things looked good,” said Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), ranking member of the oversight and investigations subpanel. “We’d like to know what happened between July and now that suddenly they went into bankruptcy.”

Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.), another member of the House subcommittee, said he felt duped by Solyndra CEO Brian Harrison when they met in Washington earlier this spring.

“He’s very persuasive one on one,” Terry said. “It kind of reminds you of [former Rep. Anthony] Weiner, doesn’t it? I’m going to do a bunch of interviews. I’m going to meet with people and see if I can get them to believe in my story.”

All affidavits remain sealed and FBI spokeswoman Julianne Sohn declined further comment on the status of the federal investigation.

Are green jobs still the future?



Obama made Solyndra a centerpiece of his green agenda, touting the company’s reliance on the loan guarantee — funded via the stimulus bill — in a May 2010 visit.

But not long after Obama left, the company started teetering. It closed one of its factories in the face of a sharp drop in solar panel prices from foreign competitors, primarily in China.

Solyndra filed for bankruptcy on Aug. 31, and when the president gave a high-profile economic speech to a joint session of Congress the next week, the once-common “green jobs” rhetoric was gone.

To the chagrin of environmentalists, his administration has also delayed EPA air and climate-change rules.

Solyndra’s failure will make it more difficult for wind and solar companies looking for tax credit extensions and new federal mandates.

“This place was supposed to be the poster child of how the original stimulus would create jobs,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on the floor Thursday. “Now it’s bankrupt, and most of its 1,100 employees are out of work. And they want another stimulus?”

Democrats say they’re OK with the inquiries into the company — especially since the bankruptcy filing and FBI raids — but they don’t want it to ripple out and stop Obama from pursuing the energy policies he’d been advocating, even if there is risk of another Solyndra.

“This is one company,” said Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee. “These are risky propositions whenever you’re dealing with innovation. But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take those risks.”