John Rossomando
Follow John on Twitter
So President Obama has no regrets on Solyndra despite the mounting evidence that his administration knew there were problems with the loan guarantee before it collapsed.
“I don’t have any regrets because if you look at the overall portfolio of loan guarantees, it’s doing well,” Obama told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in an interview on Monday. “Hindsight is always 20/20.”
But when you are the president who has racked up over $4 trillion dollars on Uncle Sam’s credit card, $535 million is just another statistic.
It’s easy to say hindsight is 20/20 when there weren’t any warning signs, but e-mails obtained by the House Energy and Commerce Committee show there were ample warnings that were ignored.
The e-mails show the Bush administration’s credit review panel at the Department of Energy saw that Solyndra was a bad deal in a Jan. 13, 2009 e-mail, saying: “it was a unanimous decision of this committee not to continue discussions with Solyndra at this time.” Yet, as soon as Obama came into office on Jan. 20, 2009 everything changed.
The Bush administration’s warnings that Solyndra lacked an effective went out the window when the Obama administration took over. Just 13 days later the Obama DOE issued a notice saying: “[W]e are approaching the beginning of the approval process for Solyndra again…"
This was after readily available news reports raised questions about Solyndra’s finances and the Bush administration warned its business plan was flawed. Isn’t that a key part of giving out any business loan or at least co-signing for one to the tune of over half a billion dollars?
Wasn’t the current economic crisis caused by subprime bad loans being given out to individuals who were less than creditworthy?
What part of “the deal is not ready for prime time?” doesn’t the president understand? Or what of the DOE staff e-mail from August 20, 2011 that prophetically showed that Solyndra would run out of cash in September 2011?
Then we learn that the Office of Management and Budget staff felt pressured to approve the Solyndra loan guarantee. That wasn’t 20/20 hindsight was it, or was it D.C. politics and pay-to-play at its worst?
And a review of some of the other solar-energy loan guarantees seem to suggest the administration has a pretty low standard of creditworthiness. When I asked the Obama White House about some of these discrepancies, they told me to call the Democratic National Committee. What gives?
At this point, Obama seems like a used car salesman who is trying to say everything is rosy when the floor of the car is about to rust out. But it turns out the rusted floor is in the U.S. Treasury, and taxpayers are on the hook for his mistakes.
Either Obama is out of touch or he’s trying to cover things up. At this point, it seems like a little of both.
You so have a Gordon Brown as president.
Posted by: speakasIsee | October 05, 2011 at 08:55 AM