3. SOLYNDRA:

Group affiliated with Koch brothers dumps $2.4M into anti-White House ads

Published:

The Koch brothers are officially piling on the White House over the Solyndra scandal, with the launch of a new $2.4 million advertising campaign by the nonprofit group that the conservative billionaire financiers are known to fund.

The new one-minute commercial by Americans for Prosperity, which is set to air in key battleground states including Virginia, Florida, New Mexico and Michigan, couches Solyndra and the Department of Energy loan guarantee program that funded it as an effort by President Obama to dole out taxpayer money to political allies.

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Solyndra, a solar manufacturer that was given a $535 million loan guarantee and touted by the White House as a model for the clean energy economy, has filed for bankruptcy. E&E examines how it got there and what it means. Click here to read the report.

"Wealthy donors with ties to Solyndra give Obama hundreds of thousands of dollars. What does Obama give them in return? Half a billion in taxpayer money to help his friends at Solyndra," an announcer states in the commercial.

"Now Solyndra is bankrupt and taxpayers are stuck with the bill."

The ad shows images of internal emails between DOE staffers from 2009 that express concern about the Solyndra loan as evidence that the White House knew that the company was on the path to bankruptcy but was more interested in providing political favors than watching out for taxpayer funds.

The emails referenced in the commercial were released by congressional investigators as part of an ongoing probe of the Solyndra deal conducted by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Tens of thousands of pages of documents have already been released to House investigators by the Obama administration during the course of the now eight-month-long investigations, and DOE sent an additional 15,000 pages of documents to the committee today.

That packet of emails and other material includes more than 1,100 pages of communications between the White House and DOE regarding the Solyndra loan.

But today's document dump is not likely to change the opinion of House Republicans, who continue to believe that the White House is holding back information that proves political interference with the loan program at the highest levels.

Tomorrow, the committee's oversight panel is scheduled to consider whether to subpoena Obama chief of staff Bill Daley and Bruce Reed, chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden, for additional internal White House documents related to Solyndra.

As the battle over documents has taken center stage on Capitol Hill, the White House sought to take back some control over the Solyndra controversy by announcing Friday that it had asked Herb Allison, a former top Treasury official, to conduct an independent audit of DOE's loan program to assess the health of the agency's portfolio of investments and find ways to protect against another Solyndra.

But in a news release today announcing its new ad, Americans for Prosperity said it was not confident in the auditor or optimistic that his work will produce any real results.

"The White House has initiated an 'internal audit' but we aren't holding our breath for any kind of substantive action," the release stated. "After all, the audit is being run by Herbert Allison, the same bureaucrat who formerly oversaw the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

"That's why AFP is launching a massive media blitz demanding that the White House provide real answers about the billions in taxpayer-funded loans and the companies who received them."

When it comes to the Solyndra probe, administration officials have argued that House Republicans are more interested in producing political theater than they are in conducting real oversight. One Democratic operative said this week that the new ad by Americans for Prosperity could help the administration further that point.

"This helps the White House make the case that this is quickly devolving from legitimate oversight into a partisan exercise," the operative said.

And Melanie Roussell, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee, said the Koch brothers and their allies are merely looking to protect their own interests by attacking the administration and its clean energy loans.

"It shouldn't shock anyone that the Koch brothers are shilling for their oil company by funding attack ads against clean energy investments," Roussell said. "They are defending their own interests -- the Koch Industries oil and gas conglomerate. This is just more of the same Republican efforts to protect corporations, in this case, their own."