The White House laments that America hasn’t built enough massive government infrastructure projects. Nonsense. At the rate it’s growing, the Great Stonewall of Obama may soon be the second largest manmade object visible from outer space.
While many construction workers across the country remain idle, Team Obama’s attorneys have been laboring overtime to erect impenetrable information blockades around three festering scandals: Solyndra, LightSquared, and Fast and Furious.
This much is clear: The “most transparent administration ever” is hyper-allergic to sunlight and subpoenas.
Indeed, pestering the White House for a full accounting of how Solyndra and its largest investor — Obama campaign-finance bundler and billionaire gambler George Kaiser — left taxpayers holding the bag is a most unwelcome intrusion into Obama’s executive privilege. So someone summon a wahmbulance. He’s feeling put upon.
Ruemmler further complained that the subpoena represents “a significant intrusion on executive branch interests.” Then she uncorked a full-throated whine:
As written, [the subpoena] encompasses all communications within the White House from the beginning of this Administration to the present that refer or relate to Solyndra, and the subpoena purports to demand a complete response in less than a week. Thus any document that references Solyndra, even in passing, is arguably responsive to the Committee’s request, and you reaffirmed this week that you intend for the request to be that broad.
While she paints the request as a last-minute surprise, the White House has been stonewalling on Solyndra all year long. And as Reason magazine’s Tim Cavanaugh points out: Compliance would be “the work of a few hours, at a time when the executive branch has 2.8 million employees. The whole thing could be done by staffers, leaving the president to focus on golf and fundraising and long, boring speeches.”
Or staving off other scandals, like the troublesome LightSquared wireless-Internet network project. This is Obama’s dangerous broadband boondoggle involving billionaire hedge-fund managers Philip Falcone and George Soros.
In September, two high-ranking witnesses — Air Force Space Command four-star general William Shelton and National Coordination Office for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing director Anthony Russo — exposed how the White House pressured them to alter their congressional testimony and play down concerns about LightSquared’s interference threat to military communications.