The hole of perfidy just keeps getting deeper for Solyndra, and by extension, their enthusiastic political enablers and financiers in the Obama administration. If you're playing catch-up in this scandal follow these links, and peruse this helpful timeline. The House Energy and Commerce Committee will try to get to the bottom of this mess at a hearing scheduled for Friday, but their task became a great deal harder now that Solyndra officials have announced they'll invoke their right against self-incrimination. Phil Klein explains why this decision is a major and meaningful reversal:
Originally, the company's president and chief executive, Brian Harrison, and W.G. Stover, Jr., its chief financial officer, were scheduled to testify as part of last Wednesday's hearing on questionable loans before the House Energy and Commerce's oversight subcommittee. That testimony was pushed back to this Friday, with the understanding, according to top committee members, that they would answer questions.
But yesterday, the executives informed the committee that they would be invoking their Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions. House Energy and Commerce Chairman Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., and oversight subcommittee chairman Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., said this violated "repeated assurances that they would testify voluntarily and answer questions." Today, they've released evidence backing up that view.
So Solyndra execs are a pack of lying scoundrels. Color me stunned. Meanwhile, the White House should be compelled to answer for its role in overruling Bush-era (and some of its own auditors') recommendations against granting half-a-trillion in loan guarantees to a company that "everyone knew" was doomed to fail. And for helping Solyndra disguise its collapse in order to help facilitate a loan refinancing that benefited one of the company's chief investors -- who just happens to also be a major Obama donor. And for granting Solyndra more stimulus money than 35 US states received for "shovel ready" highways, roads, and bridges projects. I'll leave you with this blood-boiling clip of aforementioned Solyndra investor and Obama billionaire bundler George Kaiser bragging about how his many visits to Washington helped his interests secure a massive taxpayer-funded "stimulus" windfall:
There's never been more money shoved out of the government's door in world history...than in the last few months, and in the next 18 months."
Join the conversation as a VIP Member