Solyndra Heating Up; WaPo Publishes OMB Emails

The west coast solar energy firm that I have been reporting on in recent weeks, Solyndra, which has collapsed after receiving a $535 million taxpayer guaranteed loan from the Obama administration, continues to provide tasty morsels for connected journalists.

August 2009 e-mails, released to The Washington Post, show White House officials repeatedly asking OMB reviewers when they would be able to decide on the federal loan and noting a looming press event at which they planned to announce the deal. In response, OMB officials expressed concern that they were being rushed to approve the company’s project without adequate time to assess the risk to taxpayers, according to the e-mails, which were provided by Republican congressional investigators.

WaPo goes on:

One e-mail from an OMB official referred to “the time pressure we are under to sign-off on Solyndra.” Another complained, “There isn’t time to negotiate.”

“We have ended up with a situation of having to do rushed approvals on a couple of occasions (and we are worried about Solyndra at the end of the week),” one official wrote. That August 31, 2009, message, written by a senior OMB staffer and sent to Terrell P. McSweeny, Biden’s domestic policy adviser, concluded, “We would prefer to have sufficient time to do our due diligence reviews.”

White House officials said Tuesday that no one in the administration tried to influence OMB’s decision on the loan. They stressed that the e-mails show only that the administration had a “quite active interest” in the timing of OMB’s decision.

My sources tell me that it is not completely clear, but that Solargate has the potential to engulf the Administration. "It's not Watergate, yet. But it needs to be monitored," a Capitol Hill veteran tells me.