DOE Warned of Solyndra Loan

A new batch of Solyndra emails shows that the Energy Department was warned that their plan to aid the failing solar company could be illegal and should be cleared with the Justice Department. The Treasury Department warned DOE that it could be illegal to allow private investors to be paid back ahead of taxpayers. The correspondence also reveals that Steve Spinner, a senior adviser on the loan program, lobbied officials at the Office of Management and Budget to speed up their review—despite saying he would recuse himself from the case because his wife worked for a law firm representing Solyndra. “How [expletive] hard is this?” Spinner wrote to a staffer, asking about OMB's approval of the application: “What is he waiting for? Will we have it by the end of the day?” Asked by a White House aide whether Solyndra had any financial problems, Spinner replied, “I haven’t heard anything negative on my side.”