Former Treasury Department official Herbert Allison's contributions to the Obama administration this year didn't end with his $52,500 in political donations to the president's re-election campaign and the Democratic National Committee, a senior Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee said this afternoon.

Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) told reporters Allison's White House-commissioned report on the Department of Energy's loan program should be officially counted as an "in-kind" contribution.

That report and congressional testimony Allison gave in March downplayed the level of risk within the agency's $23 billion green energy loan portfolio just months after the high-profile failure of the Solyndra solar energy company that received some $535 million in government funding through the program.

While Republicans were always leery of the White House decision to name its own auditor for its independent assessment of the loan program, they were especially critical of Allison's selection due to his previous work overseeing the controversial Troubled Asset Relief Program.

But Allison's review has been held up by Democrats this year as an endorsement of the way DOE ran the program.

"The Allison report shows that the DOE loan program is working," House Energy and Commerce Committee ranking member Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said shortly after the report's release in February. "The report is a repudiation of the partisan attack on the program by congressional Republicans and the oil and coal industries."

But after an Associated Press report uncovered Allison's donations in the months after that report was released (Greenwire, Aug. 23), Barrasso said and other GOP energy leaders said that Allison's entire investigation of the program is illegitimate.

"The supposedly independent investigator ... is actually a donor to the president's campaign, a major donor," Barrasso said. "And it looks like he made a major in-kind contribution by turning a blind eye to the administration's reckless use of taxpayer dollars."

Rep. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, said, “Essentially the judge and jury appointed by this administration in the Solyndra aftermath turns out to be one of President Obama's top contributors – not exactly a comforting watchdog with billions of taxpayer dollars at risk."

The AP today quoted Allison, who headed Fannie Mae during the George W. Bush administration, as saying his review "didn't hew to anybody's political suasion."

"It had to be fully factual or it wouldn't be credible," he said.

But Barrasso said that the revelations of Allison's political donations demonstrate how "crony capitalism" has run rampant in the Obama administration.

"This whole thing smells," Barrasso said. "It's the kind of thing that's so discouraging" to voters.