Obama donor discussed solar loan with White House

MATTHEW DALY

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — A major donor to Pres­i­dent Barack Obama dis­cussed with White House offi­cials a solar energy com­pany that received a half-billion dol­lar fed­eral loan and later went bank­rupt, newly released emails show.

The emails released by a House com­mit­tee appear to con­tra­dict repeated assur­ances by the Obama admin­is­tra­tion that the donor, George Kaiser, never talked about Solyn­dra Inc. with the White House.

Solyndra’s name came up at a White House meet­ing with Kaiser last year at a time when the Cal­i­for­nia com­pany was seek­ing a sec­ond fed­eral loan, after it had already received a $528 mil­lion loan in 2009, the emails show.

The sec­ond loan was not approved. Instead, an invest­ment ven­ture con­trolled by Kaiser made a pri­vate loan that resulted in the firm and other investors mov­ing ahead of tax­pay­ers in line for repay­ment in case of a default by Solyndra.

Solyn­dra, the first renew­able energy com­pany to receive a fed­eral loan under the 2009 stim­u­lus law, declared bank­ruptcy in Sep­tem­ber and laid off its 1,100 work­ers, leav­ing tax­pay­ers on the hook for more than a half-billion dollars.

The company’s implo­sion and rev­e­la­tions that admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials rushed to com­plete the loan in time for a Sep­tem­ber 2009 ground­break­ing have become an embar­rass­ment for Obama and a ral­ly­ing cry for GOP crit­ics of his green energy program.

Kaiser, an Okla­homa bil­lion­aire, was a “bundler” for Obama’s 2008 cam­paign, rais­ing between $50,000 and $100,000 for the pres­i­dent, records show. He also was a fre­quent White House vis­i­tor in 2009 and 2010. White House offi­cials for months have denied that Kaiser talked about Solyn­dra dur­ing those vis­its. One the nation’s rich­est men, Kaiser owns an oil com­pany and other energy inter­ests and is chief donor to the George Kaiser Fam­ily Foun­da­tion, which invests in early child­hood edu­ca­tion and com­mu­nity health.

In one email released Wednes­day by the House Energy and Com­merce Com­mit­tee, Kaiser said that when he and a foun­da­tion offi­cial vis­ited the White House last year, offi­cials showed “thor­ough knowl­edge of the Solyn­dra story, sug­gest­ing it was one their prime poster chil­dren” for renew­able energy.

In another email, a Kaiser asso­ciate appears con­fi­dent that Energy Sec­re­tary Steven Chu would approve a sec­ond loan for Solyndra.

“It appears things are headed in the right direc­tion and Chu is appar­ently stay­ing involved in Solyndra’s appli­ca­tion and con­tin­ues to talk up the com­pany as a suc­cess story,” Steve Mitchell, man­ag­ing direc­tor of Kaiser’s venture-capital firm, Arg­onaut Pri­vate Equity, wrote in a March 5, 2010, e-mail. Mitchell also served on Solyndra’s board of directors.

The emails and other released Wednes­day were obtained through a request to major investors for Solyndra-related doc­u­ments, said Sean Bonyun, a spokesman for the Energy Committee.

The emails were released as the White House faces a Thurs­day dead­line to respond to a com­mit­tee sub­poena for White House doc­u­ments related to Solyndra.

White House offi­cials accused the GOP-led com­mit­tee of mis­lead­ing the pub­lic by mak­ing it appear that Kaiser pushed for the orig­i­nal 2009 loan rather than the emer­gency loan last year, which was never approved.

“Even the doc­u­ments cherry-picked by House Repub­li­cans today affirm what we have said all along: This loan was a deci­sion made on the mer­its at the Depart­ment of Energy,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz said in an email Wednes­day. “Noth­ing in the 85,000 pages of doc­u­ments pro­duced thus far by the admin­is­tra­tion or in these four (pages) indi­cate any favoritism to polit­i­cal sup­port­ers. We wish that House Repub­li­cans were as zeal­ous about cre­at­ing jobs as they were about this over­sight investigation.”

Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., who heads a sub­com­mit­tee that is inves­ti­gat­ing the Solyn­dra loan, said the emails con­tra­dict White House claims that Kaiser did not actively lobby White House offi­cials on Solyndra.

“It is clear from these doc­u­ments that Kaiser and his employ­ees enjoyed ready access to the West Wing of the White House and exer­cised influ­ence through­out the loan process,” Stearns said

A spokesman for the Kaiser Fam­ily Foun­da­tion denied that Kaiser had lob­bied for a Solyn­dra loan.

“To reaf­firm our pre­vi­ous pub­lic state­ments, George Kaiser had no dis­cus­sions with the gov­ern­ment regard­ing the loan to Solyn­dra,” the spokesman, C. Renzi Stone, said in an email.

Hours after com­mit­tee Repub­li­cans released the emails, Democ­rats on the panel issued an eight-page memo that dis­puted nearly all of the GOP claims. The memo quotes an inter­view Kaiser gave Tues­day by video­con­fer­ence with Repub­li­can and Demo­c­ra­tic staffers on the committee.

In the inter­view, Kaiser stated, “I have never lob­bied for Solyndra.”

The Demo­c­ra­tic memo cites sev­eral emails not included by Repub­li­cans in their release of doc­u­ments Wednes­day, includ­ing one in which Kaiser tells Ken Levit, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Kaiser foun­da­tion, that he sat next to Obama for two hours at a Las Vegas din­ner fundrais­ing din­ner that also included Sen­ate Major­ity Leader Harry Reid.

“I talked in gen­eral about the Chi­nese and solar, but I didn’t want to get too spe­cific with him,” Kaiser wrote of his Oct. 22, 2010 din­ner with Obama. “I never men­tioned Solyn­dra directly.”

The emails also show Kaiser chid­ing sub­or­di­nates who urged him to per­son­ally lobby White House offi­cials on behalf of Solyn­dra. Kaiser’s foun­da­tion had invested $400 mil­lion in the solar company.

“I ques­tion the assump­tion that WH is the path to pur­sue when both of your issues here are with DOE,” Kaiser wrote in an email to Mitchell, refer­ring to the White House and the Energy Depart­ment. If the White House inter­vened, Kaiser added, “I am con­cerned that DOE/Chu would resent the inter­ven­tion and your prob­lem would get more difficult.”

Demo­c­ra­tic Reps. Henry Wax­man of Cal­i­for­nia and Diana DeGette of Col­orado said that far from show­ing a con­certed effort by Kaiser to lobby on behalf of Solyn­dra, the emails and the staff inter­view with Kaiser show the opposite.

To declare that Kaiser exer­cised improper influ­ence “is a stretch, to say the least,” they wrote.

Posted by AP News on Nov 9 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.