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Townhall
Finance...
Influence
Peddling with a Shade of Green
by Bob
Beauprez
Everybody
has heard about Solyndra and the many other failures of the DOE green
energy
grant and loan program replete with scandalous political paybacks to
Obama
supporters. Now
there’s another one. It
involves the largest single loan guarantee
of the entire $16 billion program, a current Cabinet Secretary and a
former
Chief-of-Staff to Vice-President Joe Biden.
BrightSource
Energy spent two years and half a million dollars lobbying the Obama
Administration to approve a $1.6 billion loan guarantee for the
gigantic
Ivanpah solar-power plant in California’s Mojave Desert. Facing what the company
called a “do-or-die
deadline” in early 2011, BrightSource pulled out all the stops and
further
leveraged their considerable political connections to the max.
Bernie
Toon, former Chief-of-Staff to Joe Biden in the Senate, was hired to
ramp-up
lobbying efforts with top Administration officials.
On March 9, 2011, just days after being
hired, Toon escorted three BrightSource executives to the White House
for a
meeting with Alan Hoffman, according to a Wall Street Journal
investigation. Hoffman
was Deputy
Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief of Staff to the
Vice-President
according to White House personnel reports.
On March
15, there was a meeting with officials at the White House’s Office of
Management and Budget.
BrightSource
also leveraged the influence of company Chairman John Bryson by sending
a
“proposed letter” to the DOE green-energy loan program director,
Jonathan
Silver, threatening to call on Bryson’s close personal friend White
House
Chief-of-Staff William Daley for intervention.
Silver apparently got the message, and within
hours Silver sent an email
saying there was no need for Bryson to contact Daley.
“Mr. Silver assured BrightSource that its
deal was ‘on track’” according to the WSJ.
The $1.6
billion loan guarantee was approved on April 5, and Toon’s lobbying
contract
ended. He clipped a
cool $40,000 for
barely a month of his service. The
next
month, May 2011, Obama nominated John Bryson to be Secretary of
Commerce. Bryson
recently took a medical leave of
absence after being involved in two hit-and-run accidents in southern
California.
Regardless
of all the meetings and influence peddling at the highest levels, the
White
House maintains that the DOE made the BrightSource loan guarantee
decision
“based on the project’s merits” completely independent of White House
pressure
or political considerations.
But, they
also made sure that the DOE’s John Silver “didn’t respond to messages
seeking
comment” by the Wall Street Journal about this latest messy disclosure
of how
business really gets done in the Obama White House.
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