Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., helped secure billions of dollars in federal loan guarantees for at least nine corporate donors who contributed to a green energy nonprofit operated by his former staffers and a current campaign operative, according to the Free Beacon.
Reid's top political strategist, Rebecca Lambe, founded the Clean Energy Project (CEP) in 2008 and served as its executive director, and the senator's former chief of staff Susan McCue served as CEP's president during the same time. Lambe now works as an adviser to the nonprofit, and McCue sits on its board of directors.
"It is run by Reid insiders, funded by those who want Reid's political favors, and there's a track record of Reid dispensing favors to those who fund it," Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, told the Beacon. "As the late Senator [Sam] Ervin said, sometimes things are what they look like."
Fulcrum Bioenergy, a California-based biofuel company, first contributed to CEP in 2013, and one year later, Reid directed tens of millions of dollars in federal grants to the company, according to the Free Beacon. Fulcrum contributed to CEP again in 2014.
In 2014, the company attended a clean energy summit cosponsored by Reid and CEP, where Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced a $105 million grant for the company. Two weeks later, the Defense Department awarded it another $70 million.
It turns out that another former CEP board member, John Podesta of the lobbying group the Podesta Group, began representing Fulcrum in April 2014. Soon after, the firm had secured its $175 million in federal grants. Reid took credit for delivering the Pentagon's share.
Then there's the green energy company, Ormat Geothermal. The company has donated to Lydia Ball, a former Reid aide, and the company's president has donated to Reid himself. In return, Reid helped secure Ormat a $350 million loan guarantee. Reid also helped secure almost $100 million for an Ormat contractor, Nevada Geothermal.
While on Reid's staff, Ball's job was to advise Nevada companies on how to most effectively obtain financing through the stimulus plan, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, according to her LinkedIn.
Because most of CEP's corporate supporters are companies that have either benefited or are likely to benefit from federal policies that subsidize green energy technology, and Reid just happens to routinely push for such policies in the Senate, the donations to CEP suggest a "vehicle to promote pay-to-play politics," Boehm told the Free Beacon.
Permit approvals for many Nevada green energy projects were expedited by the Department of the Interior (DOI) because of pressure from Reid, according The New York Times. Among these companies were Ormat, Nevada Geothermal, and three other CEP donors, Abengoa, First Solar and Solar Reserve.
Another CEP donor, NV Energy, the state's largest utility, got a $138 million stimulus grant following Reid's advocacy.
Reid also advocated on behalf of Amonix, a solar company that CEP board member Rose McKinney-James represents.
"I made sure the Recovery Act included almost $6 million in tax caps to help Amonix open this facility," Reid said in 2010.
Anti-cronyism watchdogs are of course skeptical of Reid's backroom dealings, and even the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee took notice, conducting an investigation into the Obama administration's support for green energy projects in 2011.
"The strong ties between the company and the Senate Majority leader raise questions about whether the DOE acted in the best interests of the American people when it approved [Ormat's] loan guarantee," the committee said in a 2012 report.
These green energy businesses likely viewed their donations to CEP as investments, according to William Yeatman, a senior fellow and energy policy expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
"The entire green energy industry - every bit of it - is dependent on political favoritism," he told the Beacon. "And with whom better to curry favor than the Senate Majority Leader - especially during the stimulus era, a period during which oversight was shortchanged for speed of distribution."
