The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s top Democrat let loose on his Republican colleagues on Friday, characterizing their Friday hearing about the bankrupt solar panel maker Solyndra as a “kangaroo court.”
“This investigation is beginning to resemble a kangaroo court,” Rep. Henry Waxman, (D-CA) declared at the committee’s Friday morning hearing. “At our last hearing, witnesses who asserted their lawful constitutional rights were publicly humiliated. And now the Republican majority is withholding exculpatory information from the public.”
The Republican-controlled committee is continuing to dig into the rationale behind the Obama administration’s handling of its $535 million loan guarantee to Fremont, California based solar start-up Solyndra, which is now bankrupt.
The Republicans had scheduled a hearing for Friday morning to hear testimony from two Treasury officials who were involved in working on the loan guarantee with their Energy Department counterparts. But they did not include or invite any officials from DOE to provide any insight into their interpretation of a landmark energy bill that created the loan guarantee program and the terms on which it is supposed to be executed.
A huge document dump from the White House Office of Management and Budget on Friday gave both sides fresh ammunition from which to selectively leak e-mails, and Republicans have seized on a disagreement between Treasury and DOE officials on the question of whether DOE were legally allowed to put U.S. taxpayers in second place to be paid back after Solyndra’s other creditors in the private sector if the company went bankrupt.
Democrats earlier in the week had asked the Republicans to include a DOE official to testify in Friday’s hearing, but the Republicans said that they would invite someone from the DOE to testify in a subsequent hearing.
On Friday, both Waxman and House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Ranking Member Diana DeGette, (D-CO) lashed out at Republicans for the move, and also for not letting Democrats include in the hearing’s record a 6-page legal memo that outlines DOE’s legal rationale explaining why they believed that they had the authority to subordinate its loan guarantee to private investors when Solyndra was re-financing earlier this year.
“Our investigation needs to be fair. Humiliating witnesses is not fair. Preventing the Department of Energy from testifying is not fair. Suppressing exculpatory evidence is not fair,” Waxman said.
The Republicans on the committee didn’t explain why a DOE official couldn’t testify at the hearing on Wednesday. Instead, they spent the morning bickering with their Democratic colleagues and subjecting the two Treasury officials Gary Grippo, Treasury’s deputy assistant secretary for fiscal operations and policy, and Gary H. Burner, the chief financial officer for Treasury’s federal financing bank to pointed questioning, and extracting “yes” and “no” answers out of them.
During the hearing, Grippo said that Treausury doesn’t have any decision-making power when it comes to making decisions regarding DOE loans. He said that Treasury’s role is a consultative one, and that the department is there to give DOE advice.
The DOE legal document at issue can be viewed below. There are two versions. A draft version and a final version. The draft version, dated January 19, 2011, shows that the analysis from DOE’s Loan Program Office was sent directly to Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s General Counsel Scott Blake Harris.
