Friday Document Dumpster Diving (Through Piles Of Green)

It's big, it's green, it's full of garbage, and you just know that it stinks.

The White House backed this dumpster up to Capital Hill last night - beep, beep, beep - and dropped off 313 pages of documents about its pungent decision to give a half-billion dollars in taxpayer money to a failing solar panel manufacturer.

Who do they think they're fooling with these late-night document dumps? Does the White House think no one will notice? Well, the White House might be right about that, since I saw absolutely nothing about last night's dump in this morning's Washington Post or in the New York Times.

At least The Hill newspaper had a story about it:

Amid threats by a top House Republican to pursue contempt charges, the White House on Friday sent lawmakers more internal documents related to the $535 million loan guarantee to failed solar firm Solyndra.

The White House, in providing the 313 pages of documents, again denied that approval of the loan guarantee in 2009 was influenced by politics, an allegation that Republicans have repeated for months.

--snip --

Friday marked the third time that the White House provided internal documents to the House Energy and Commerce Committee since Republicans on the panel issued a subpoena for all Solyndra communications in November.

This particular Solyndra dump may have been the third after the subpoena was issued, but it was the fourth one to occur on a Friday night, according to my count. The first was on October 7, 2011, followed by one on November 4, 2011, and then by another on January 13, 2012. The January dump was on a Friday before a three-day Federal weekend, so I guess those documents needed to be buried extra deep. If the White House is giving up embarrassing e-mails, you know it's a Friday.

You might wonder, what could possibly be so embarrassing about all the green energy loan guarantee stuff that the White House was pushing so enthusiastically just last year?

Well, there were Obama fundraisers advocating for loans in which they had direct personal financial interest. Such as Steven Spinner, who was appointed to a job overseeing the Department of Energy's loan guarantee program despite the fact that his wife's law firm received $2.4 million in federal funds for legal fees related to the Solyndra loan. If the parties involved in that deal had been a Republican fundraiser, his lawyer-wife, and Haliburton, would any Democratic Congressman accept it just because the administration issued a favorable ethics opinion?

And there was also the matter of the Energy Department restructuring the Solyndra loan on the eve of the firm's bankruptcy so as to prevent the taxpayers from having any claim on the firm's assets after it went bust. That's bad enough all by itself, but they also did it without first seeking a Justice Department opinion on whether that action would violate the law governing such loans.

Will there be more green document dumps? You can bet there will be. According to CBS News, there are eleven more green energy firms that are going bankrupt, just like Solyandra, after the administration approved them for more than $6.5 billion in federal loans.