Obama Solyndra Scandal Back in Court!

[INSIDE JW]

JUDICIAL WATCH SUES FOR SOLYNDRA RECORDS OF BIDEN’S CHIEF OF STAFF


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Solyndra is one of the worst scandals of the Obama era – and Ron
Klain
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President Biden’s chief of staff, is right in the middle of it. The
issue is fresh again given the new administration’s plans to fund
more Solyndra-type companies with countless tax dollars.

Solyndra
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is the solar power company that accepted a loan of half a billion of
your taxpayer dollars that were most lost. An Energy Department
investigation found
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that “the actions of certain Solyndra officials were, at best,
reckless and irresponsible or, at worst, an orchestrated effort to
knowingly and intentionally deceive and mislead the Department.”

In December 2011, we filed separate FOIA lawsuits
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against the Obama Department of Energy
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and the Office of Management and Budget
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to obtain records regarding the taxpayer funded government loan
provided to Solyndra.

We have now filed a FOIA suit against the Office of Management and
Budget and the U.S. Department of Energy to obtain records of
communications between Klain, who is now President Biden’s chief of
staff, and the agencies about Solyndra
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(_Judicial Watch v. Office of Management and Budget et al. _
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1:21-cv-00303)).

We sued after the agencies failed to respond to December 2020 FOIA
requests seeking “communications between Klain and any official of
the Office of Management and Budget/Department of Energy regarding the
solar company Solyndra.” We requested records from January 20, 2009,
to January 1, 2011, when Klain was chief of staff to then-Vice
President Biden.

In 2011, internal emails reportedly
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uncovered by investigators for the House Energy and Commerce Committee
show the Obama administration was monitoring the progress of the $535
million taxpayer loan, “even as analysts were voicing serious
concerns about the risk involved.”

“This deal is NOT ready for prime time," one White House budget
analyst wrote in a March 10, 2009 email, nine days before the
administration formally announced the loan.

“If you guys think this is a bad idea, I need to unwind the W[est]
W[ing] QUICKLY," wrote Ronald A. Klain, who was chief of staff to Vice
President Joe Biden, in another email sent March 7, 2009. The "West
Wing" is the portion of the White House complex that holds the offices
of the president and his top staffers.

White House energy adviser Heather Zichal reportedly e-mailed
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a warning to Klain, Obama aide Valerie Jarrett and Communications
Director Dan Pfeiffer: “Here’s the deal: Solyndra is going to
announce they are laying off 200 of their 1,200 workers. _No es
bueno_.”

Klain was instrumental in getting President Obama to visit Solyndra.
He reportedly wrote
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to Jarrett:

Sounds like there are some risk factors here, but that’s true of any
innovative company POTUS would visit. It looks OK to me. … The
reality is that if POTUS visited 10 such places over the next 10
months, probably a few will be belly-up by election day 2012—but
that to me is the reality of saying we want to help promote
cutting-edge, new-economy industries.

Solyndra later went bankrupt.

Obama and his misdeed continue to haunt the Oval Office.

JUDICIAL WATCH CONTINUES FIGHT TO OPEN BIDEN’S HIDDEN SENATE RECORDS

What was Joe Biden doing as a senator that he now wants to keep
secret? We’re trying to find out.

We filed a notice of appeal
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with the Supreme Court of Delaware, asking for access to records about
President Joe Biden’s senatorial records held by the University of
Delaware. Biden’s papers include more than 1,850 boxes of archival
records from his senate career.

This appeal seeks a reversal of the opinion of the Superior Court of
Delaware, which is blocking a state Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
request. It comes in the lawsuit
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we
filed with the Daily Caller News Foundation after a Delaware Attorney
General’s opinion
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denied access to the records (_Daily Caller News Foundation v.
University of Delaware_
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(No. N20A-07-001)). The Delaware FOIA lawsuit was filed in the
Superior Court of the State of Delaware on July 2, 2020.

The appeal challenges the Superior Court of Delaware’s January 4,
2021, ruling upholding the Delaware state attorney general’s opinion
that the records are not “public records” because, the opinion
concludes without evidence, no public funds are used to support the
Biden records project at the University of Delaware.

We responded in court that it is impossible for the housing of
Biden’s senatorial records in the University of Delaware’s Library
to not be supported by any public funds. We noted that the University
admitted that “[t]he State of Delaware provides the University with
approximately $120 million each year through an appropriation in the
state budget,” but has yet to show how public funds are not used to
support the papers.

We further pointed out that “archival storage space and professional
staff members’ time are things of value that it can be inferred are
paid for with public funds,” and we note that the requests even
listed the “University personnel who maintain the Senatorial Papers
whose salaries, it can be inferred, are paid with State funds.” W
requested that the Superior Court order the University to search for
and produce the requested records.

“We have no idea why the University of Delaware is hiding these
materials that the public should have every right to see and we are
grateful for Judicial Watch and our local counsel for pushing this
case hard. When people ask why our institutions are no longer trusted
they should look up this case,” said Daily Caller News Foundation
President Neil Patel.

We filed our FOIA lawsuit
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after the University denied its April 30, 2020, request for:

* All records regarding the proposed release of the records
pertaining to former Vice President Joe Biden’s tenure as a Senator
that have been housed at the University of Delaware Library since
2012. This request includes all related records of communication
between the University of Delaware and any other records created
pertaining to any meeting of the Board of Trustees during which the
proposed release of the records was discussed.
* All records of communication between any representative of the
University of Delaware and former Vice President Biden or any other
individual acting on his behalf between January 1, 2018 and the
present.

On April 30, the Daily Caller News Foundation submitted its FOIA
request to the University for:

* All agreements concerning the storage of more than 1,850 boxes of
archival records and 415 gigabytes of electronic records from Joe
Biden’s senate career from 1973 through 2009.
* Communications between the staff of the University of Delaware
Library and Joe Biden or his senatorial, vice-presidential or
political campaign staff, or for anyone representing any of those
entities between 2010 [April 30,2020] about Joe Biden’s senate
records.
* Any logs or sign-in sheets recording any individuals who have
visited the special-collections department where records from Joe
Biden’s senate career are stored between 2010 to the date of this
request.
* All records from Joe Biden’s Senate career that have been
submitted to the University of Delaware Library.

We and the Daily Caller News Foundation are being represented by
Delaware lawyers Ted Kittila and Bill Green of Halloran Farkas +
Kittila LLP.

There is significant public interest in the special deal between Joe
Biden and the University of Delaware that is keeping Biden’s Senate
records completely secret. Delaware law is explicit in requiring state
entities, including the University of Delaware, to provide public
access to these records. We won’t let this drop.

ENERGY DEPARTMENT LEAVES NUCLEAR LABS VULNERABLE TO FORMER EMPLOYEES

Given what we know about China’s wholesale theft
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of American secrets, it is discomforting to learn how casual our
government is about nuclear security – particularly in its
lackadaisical control of credentials granting continued access to
former employees and contractors. Our _Corruption Chronicles_ blog has
the disturbing details
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The government agency that oversees the nation’s nuclear
laboratories and the highly classified material they house often does
not revoke the security clearance of employees and contractors after
they leave, potentially compromising national security. The failure
involves the Department of Energy (DOE), which issues the
authorization via Personal Identity Verification (PIV) cards that
serve as entry badges indicating the level of access to classified
matter or special nuclear material. PIV cards also allow employees to
enter, occupy or leave DOE sites and facilities.

During a three-year period more than 10,000 federal and contract
workers left the DOE through retirement, resignation, removal, or
death, according to a recently released DOE Inspector General report
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Among them were thousands of individuals with security clearances and
an alarmingly high percentage of their PIVs were not properly
cancelled. In thousands of other cases the names of separated federal
and contract workers did not even match records in the government
database. “If clearances and PIV cards are not properly terminated,
recovered, and destroyed, former employees may gain unauthorized
access to department buildings or information,” the DOE watchdog
writes in the lengthy document. “This risk has been demonstrated by
incidents at the Department and other federal agencies in which former
employees have accessed facilities or systems using unrecovered
badges.”

Investigators examined records for 2,703 separated DOE employees and
contractors at the agency headquarters in Washington D.C. and a field
office in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They found that 66% of former
employees’ PIV cards not marked as “destroyed” in the government
database known as USAccess were not retrieved and manually eliminated
per destruction records reviewed. Nearly 40% of departed workers’
PIV cards or employment statuses had not been updated in USAccess to
reflect that the person was gone and no longer required access to DOE
facilities and systems. In 30% of the cases, the former DOE and
contractor employees’ security clearances were not terminated in
accordance with agency requirements. “We noticed that several
Headquarters Federal and contractor employees remained active in
USAccess for months and even years after separation,” the report
states. “For example, one employee that separated in November 2015
remained active in USAccess when we reviewed the database in July
2018, over 2 years later. Further, some of these employees were
identified as having been removed from their jobs and others were
deceased.”

During the audit, a DOE official told investigators that he witnessed
a former employee at the agency headquarters enter the building and
access his former workspace in a restricted area. The former
staffer’s PIV card had not been recovered and his status in USAccess
had not been updated, as required. The report offers a separate
example at another federal agency in which a terminated employee
repeatedly used administrator credentials to log onto government
servers and make unauthorized changes to the agency’s website,
including disabling a portion of the site. “To mitigate the risk of
unauthorized access, the Department needs to take actions to ensure
that it terminates security clearances and PIV card access for
separated Federal and contractor employees in a timely manner,” the
watchdog writes.

This is especially important considering the Department of Energy
oversees the nation’s nuclear laboratories, which have long been
plagued by embarrassing security breaches. The last thing they need is
a disgruntled former employee with access to the facility. Judicial
Watch has reported on the problem extensively and helped expose a
disturbing scheme back in 1999 involving a Chinese Communist scientist
(Wen Ho Lee) who stole nuclear secrets from the Los Alamos National
Laboratory
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in New Mexico. Lee
was not prosecuted by the Clinton Justice Department because then
Attorney General Janet Reno claimed the accusations were racist.
Judicial Watch represented the whistleblower
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Notra Trulock, responsible for launching an investigation into Lee’s
actions.

A multitude of scandals have rocked Los Alamos, the nation’s key
nuclear weapons research facility, since then. A Los Alamos scientist
and his wife, both contractors at the facility, stole classified
restricted data
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involving
nuclear weapons and passed it along to a foreign government that is
hostile to the U.S. Before that, Los Alamos officials sent top secret
data relating to nuclear weapons via an open electronic mail network
and police accidentally stumbled upon it in a drug dealer’s mobile
home
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during a drug bust. In 2017 the lab mistakenly shipped
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radioactive material on a commercial cargo plane. A few years later an
epidemic of theft, fraud and security lapses led the DOE to label it a
“systematic management failure
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The problem is not limited to Los Alamos. The nation’s other
government-owned nuclear labs (there are 17) have also experienced
decades of faulty management, weak security, and lousy oversight.

MYSTERY IN MENA: THE DEATH OF A PATRIOT

Many well-known controversies have largely unknown characters and
investigators who, though important, are sometimes lost to history.
Such is the case with a story researched by Micah Morrison, our chief
investigative reporter, who was sent to Arkansas years ago by _The
Wall Street Journal_ to look into suspicions about an otherwise
forgettable airfield. A key local investigator of the goings-on in
Mena recently passed away, and Morrison recalls
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his memory in his _Investigative Bulletin_.

I first met Russell Welch at a cheap motel on the outskirts of Mena,
Arkansas, in the summer of 1994. It was a searing hot day and I had
left the door open for some air and I heard a car slowly drive across
the gravel and stop. I looked up and Russell’s gaunt shadow crossed
the doorway.

He was no one’s idea of an Arkansas State Police investigator. Lean,
with long brown hair and a handlebar mustache, soft-spoken, his face
ravaged by anthrax that almost killed him in 1991, Russell had found
himself on a case he never wanted and in the middle of a storm. The
case was the investigation of drug smuggler Barry Seal and his
activities at remote Mena Airfield in western Arkansas. The storm was
Seal’s connections, real and imagined, to a network of government
officials and their enablers, including the then-president of the
United States, Bill Clinton.

Wall Street Journal editor Robert L. Bartley had sent me to Mena to
figure out what was going on. CBS had been there before me. A legion
of journalists and con men and grifters and government investigators
would follow.

The Mena story is part of the cultural conspiracy landscape now. You
can read about Judicial Watch’s latest investigation here
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and find more background on the case here
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Or you can watch
the movie
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starring Tom Cruise. Or the other movie starring Dennis Hopper.

Russell believed that the conspiracy mischief that engulfed Mena was
mainly due to Terry Reed’s book, “Compromised: Clinton, Bush, and
the CIA.” It spins a vast, largely fictional tale about a
drugs-for-money-for-guns conspiracy involving Bill Clinton, George
H.W. Bush, infamous CIA operatives, Arkansas associates of the
Clintons, Oliver North, Seal, Reed himself, Reagan Administration
figures, the FBI, the Justice Department, members of Congress,
criminals, Contras, cocaine cowboys, and a partridge in a pear tree.

But as Bartley recognized, most conspiracy theories contain a grain of
truth, maybe even a few grains of truth. So he sent me down to
Arkansas to look for it.

Russell Welch was not fooled. “From the very beginning, I have said
that Reed was making stuff up,” Russell wrote me last year. “He
was lying about Mena.” Russell had the details and the evidence on
Reed.

Russell was the best kind of investigator—one who hates lies and is
stubborn about the truth. He played by the book. It got him into
trouble.

As the Arkansas State Police investigator based in Mena and tasked
with monitoring Mena Airfield, Russell was assigned the Seal case
around 1985, about the time one of Seal’s confederates was killed in
a nearby plane crash. He quickly discovered that Seal had set up shop
in Mena and was using the remote airfield as part of a smuggling
network running cocaine from Colombia.

He also discovered that the Drug Enforcement Agency was already on to
Seal. Seal had flipped and was cooperating with federal authorities.

Separately at Mena, and unconnected to Seal, other federal entities
were running training exercises in the Ouachita Mountains and
servicing aircraft used on clandestine missions at Mena Airfield.
Judicial Watch disclosed last year
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that two of the federal entities were the CIA and the Defense
Department.

“I did not want to investigate the Seal [case],” Russell wrote me.
“I knew it was out of my league and the DEA should do the
investigation.” But he was ordered to open a criminal investigation
into Seal’s drug smuggling and money laundering.

“I started the criminal investigation,” Russell wrote. “I
conducted it like any other investigation. I found that Seal had been
[secretly] indicted in two different jurisdictions in Florida. He
became a snitch for DEA Group 7 in Miami. His [immunity] period
started in March of 1984. I knew that I had to keep my investigation
focused on events prior to that. Anything that Seal…did after that
date could have been part of a legitimate [DEA] investigation.”

Partnering with an IRS investigator, Bill Duncan, Russell compiled
significant evidence of Seal’s drug smuggling and money laundering.
“I did everything by the book,” Russell wrote. “When I finished
the bulk of my investigation, there were no conspiracy theories
floating around, yet. That started with Terry Reed.”

But the case developed by Russell and Bill Duncan went nowhere, killed
by federal stonewalling and foot-dragging. A sinister conspiracy? Or
something more mundane, like turf wars over witnesses and evidence? It
was never entirely clear. But Russell and Bill persisted, and their
careers suffered.

In 1986, Seal was murdered in Baton Rouge by Colombian gunmen. Later
that year, a C-130 linked to Seal was shot down over Nicaragua with a
load of guns for the Contra rebels, dragging a Mena interface into the
Iran-Contra affair. In 1994, “Compromised” began to circulate,
dragging the Clinton White House into the conspiracy.

Russell retired in 1996, but he never escaped the story. He was
pursued by journalists, detectives, TV and documentary producers,
authors promising book deals, conspiracy theorists, mooks, kooks, and
menacers. For the most part, he kept silent, but he continued to work
the case, taking notes, compiling evidence, documenting lies and
discrepancies. He died in October, with his wife and his two sons at
his side. He was 72. Let the record reflect that in addition to being
a devoted husband and father and grandfather, Russell Franklin Welch
loved to read and play the guitar, held a Master’s Degree in
English, and served with distinction as an Army medic in the Vietnam
War.

“The biggest regret in my life is not quitting law enforcement and
spending more time with my children,” Russell wrote. “Seeing the
hurt in their eyes, so many times, as I had to stop playing with them
and go to work, was unbearable. Telling them that I would not be able
to watch them at certain school functions, because I had to go to
work, broke my heart. It still breaks my heart, and I think about it
every day. While I was working on the Seal case, I was, also,
conducting other investigations: murder, rape, robbery, and so on. I
was busy all the time.”

That first day with Russell in Mena in the summer of 1994, we sat in
the plastic chairs outside my motel room and talked a while. That case
of anthrax that nearly killed him? The doctors never could figure out
where it came from. One doctor had blurted out it was an infection
caused by “military grade” anthrax, but Russell was cautious, not
assigning blame, and later tests were inconclusive. Anthrax certainly
caught the attention of Bartley at Journal, who brought it up with me
many times over the years. And Russell had enemies. The Seal case.
Murder, rape, robbery, and so on.

Later that day, we drove up into the Ouachita Mountains to take a look
at one of Seal’s landing strips cut into the deep woods. I brought a
metal detector, hoping to find some sort of journalistic treasure.
Russell brought an AR-15 assault rifle. It crossed my mind that he
could just shoot me and bury me in the mountains and be done with the
troublesome Yankee. This was mysterious Mena, after all, and I was far
from home. But you’ve got to know who to trust.

“Here,” Russell said, handing me the AR-15 and taking a camera
from the trunk of the car, “let’s take a picture.”

I had a copy of that picture for years. So did Russell. That too is
evidence.

Until next week …







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