ZRX1200
14 years ago
"Justice Department will investigate and prosecute"




ROTFLMMFWPAO!!!!!!!!!
rfenst
14 years ago

"Justice Department will investigate and prosecute"




ROTFLMMFWPAO!!!!!!!!!

ZRX1200 wrote:




It is the only way to have any way to mitigate the political fallout.
rfenst
14 years ago

"Justice Department will investigate and prosecute"




ROTFLMMFWPAO!!!!!!!!!

ZRX1200 wrote:




It is the only way to have any way to mitigate the political fallout.
ZRX1200
14 years ago
True counselor.

But this justice dept. follows marching orders from the white house not rule of law.
rfenst
14 years ago

True counselor.

But this justice dept. follows marching orders from the white house not rule of law.

ZRX1200 wrote:




Maybe. Maybe not. I assure you that U.S. Attorney's Office career prosecutors, others than those at the top of the food chain, are willing to play politics over the law. They are a very serious segment of the legal community, who are not to be f'd with. Besides, this is just too big and too wide- lender(s), guarantees, BK court, media, R's, House and Senate Committees, etc., to sweep under the rug. And, there are already anti-Obama TV ads being run more than one year before the election. Time will tell...
ZRX1200
14 years ago
I hope so....no party should be above the law.
HockeyDad
14 years ago

It is the only way to have any way to mitigate the political fallout.

rfenst wrote:





I hope they didn't sell solar panels to the Mexican drug cartels.
HockeyDad
14 years ago

I hope so....no party should be above the law.

ZRX1200 wrote:



Except for a West Coast party. They don't stop.
Charlie
14 years ago
It's only money...............and this Administration seems to toss it around like confetti at a football game. We need sanity in the White House.
DrMaddVibe
14 years ago
Obama an ‘Early Investor’ in LightSquared – Updated
September 16, 2011
By Lonely Conservative 8 comments
If you are unfamiliar with the LightSquared scandal, see my earlier post. The Obama administration pressured an Air Force general to alter his testimony in order to downplay the havoc the company’s signals could wreak on military GPS systems. We knew that some of President Obama’s donors are invested in LightSquared. What we didn’t know (or at least I didn’t) is that Obama himself was a LightSquared investor. But don’t take my word for it, this was published at the Huffington Post, hardly a news outlet that should fear being referred to Attack Watch.

Obama himself was an early investor and came to the presidency a firm believer in expanding broadband. He remains close to other early investors, like Gips and investment manager George W. Haywood, inviting some to luxe social events at the White House and more intimate gatherings like a night of poker and beer.



Obama installed one of his biggest fundraisers, Julius Genachowski, a campaign “bundler” and broadband cheerleader, as chairman of the FCC, whose staff granted LightSquared a special waiver to operate.

Well, isn’t that interesting? Bending the rules to enrich his friends and donors, and himself personally, at the expense of unsuspecting travelers and the United States military! But not to worry, LightSquared officials tell us no government officials stand to benefit financially. But since their books are closed I guess we just have to take them at their word.

(Via Human Events, via Unified Patriots)

Update: The plot thickens. Ed Morrissey linked, and added another little tidbit of information you probably were unaware of. Most presidents put their investments into blind trusts when taking office to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest. President Obama didn’t do that, in the name of transparency of course. He’s so transparent you have to request his financial disclosure forms, which Ed has done. We’ll see if he gets a response.

Update: Blogs for Victory linked. Thanks.


http://lonelyconservative.com/2011/09/obama-an-early-investor-in-lightsquared/ 






Oh my...conflict of interest anyone?
DrMaddVibe
14 years ago
Obama fundraiser linked to loan program that aided Solyndra


The revelation is likely to spur new inquiries about the solar company's political influence. Separately, California lawmakers seek investigation of a state tax break the firm received.

Reporting from Washington and Los Angeles— The White House faced mounting political complications as a second top fundraiser for President Obama was linked to a federal loan guarantee program that backed a now-bankrupt Silicon Valley solar energy company, and as two California lawmakers called for investigations of a state tax break granted to the firm.

Steve Spinner, who helped monitor the Energy Department's issuance of $25 billion in government loan guarantees to renewable energy projects, was one of Obama's top fundraisers in 2008 and is raising money for the president's 2012 reelection campaign.

Spinner did not have any role in the selection of applicants for the loan program and, in fact, was recused from the decision to grant a $535-million loan guarantee to Solyndra Inc. because his wife's law firm represented the company, administration officials said Friday.

But Spinner's role as a top official in the Energy Department program, which had not been previously revealed, is likely to spur new inquiries into whether political influence played a role in the handling of the "green" energy fund. Solyndra faces a congressional probe, a criminal investigation and separate internal inquiries at the Energy and Treasury departments.

"This will fuel more questions, and now you've got real people involved at the inspector-general level who will be turning over chairs and cabinets, asking questions," said Stanley Brand, a criminal defense and ethics lawyer in Washington who has served as general counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives.

He noted that none of the details that had emerged suggested any laws had been broken. "It's embarrassing, it's ham-handed, it looks bad, but so far all we have is the White House trying to advantage itself in a political way with a loan," he said.

The largest investments in Solyndra were funds operated on behalf of the family foundation of billionaire George Kaiser, another major fundraiser for Obama in 2008. Kaiser has denied personally investing in the solar energy company or talking to White House officials about the loan.

Some Republicans in Congress charge that the White House pushed to get the loan approved for political reasons, which the White House denies.

Before its collapse, Solyndra was a showcase of the White House initiative to develop clean-energy alternatives. Obama visited the factory in May and praised Solyndra as a green technology company that would create jobs and help lead the country's economic recovery.

The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Sept. 6. Two days later, agents with the FBI and Energy Department's inspector general served a search warrant at Solyndra headquarters in an inquiry focusing on whether the company misled the government in applying for the loans.

In announcing its closure, Solyndra cited an unexpected reduction in demand for its products and intense competition from Chinese companies that drove down the price of solar panels it could sell.

Spinner, who raised at least $500,000 for Obama in 2008, is leading efforts to raise money from the technology industry for the president's reelection campaign. He did not respond to requests for comment Friday.

Last week, he invited Obama fundraisers who were in Chicago for a national finance committee meeting to the launch of the Technology for Obama fundraising program. In July, the Obama campaign credited Spinner with raising between $200,000 and $500,000 so far this year.

Spinner was a Silicon Valley investor who founded a sports and wellness company before he joined the administration in April 2009 after serving on Obama's transition team. He was named an advisor to Energy Secretary Steven Chu and was charged with helping oversee a loan guarantee program authorized by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the economic stimulus program.

"Steve Spinner acted as a liaison between the Recovery Act Office and the Loan Programs Office," Energy Department spokesman Damien LaVera said in a statement Friday. "In that capacity, he played no role in the decision-making or evaluation of the Solyndra loan application."

During his tenure, the program approved 20 loan guarantees totaling $25 billion for energy storage, wind power and solar generation, according to Spinner's resume on LinkedIn. Among them was final approval for Solyndra, which planned to manufacture thin solar modules for flat rooftops.

The company applied for a loan guarantee in December 2006, filing under a program created by George W. Bush's administration. It received a conditional commitment for $535 million in March 2009, shortly before Spinner arrived.

In the months that followed, department staffers negotiated the final terms and provided the Office of Management and Budget with data as it assessed the risks of the deal.

In August 2009, while that risk assessment was underway, White House officials began expressing interest in having Vice President Joe Biden announce the deal during a trip to California the following month, according to emails released to House investigators this week. That spurred exchanges between officials


Stinkdyr
14 years ago

So this guy gets an investment incentive (bail out) from the O, they pay off the big investors (contributors), then they declare?
What a racket!

itsawaldo wrote:




Your tax $$ at waste!

🇨🇮
DrMaddVibe
14 years ago
Issa to launch probe of Obama actions on Solyndra, LightSquared


By Justin Sink - 09/20/11 09:55 AM ET

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said Tuesday that his committee plans to investigate government loan programs to private corporations in light of allegations of improper dealings between the White House and failed energy company Solyndra and wireless start-up LightSquared.

"I want to see when the president and his cronies are picking winners and losers… it wasn't because there were large contributions given to them," the chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee said Tuesday morning on C-SPAN.


Issa said the committee was looking at whether it was improper for members of Congress or White House staff to select companies eligible for subsidized government loans when those companies could give campaign donations. Loan programs have been a popular tool to provide funding for popular industries — like tech, green energy, and American auto companies — at more favorable terms than could be secured privately.

The Obama administration has been defending itself against criticism by Republicans that it exerted improper influence to the aid of both companies.

Solyndra abruptly filed for bankruptcy earlier this month, surprising both employees and the administration, which had secured $535 million in low-interest loans for the company.
DrMaddVibe
14 years ago
In ’05 Investing, Obama Took Same Path as Donors By MIKE McINTIRE and CHRISTOPHER DREW


Less than two months after ascending to the United States Senate, Barack Obama bought more than $50,000 worth of stock in two speculative companies whose major investors included some of his biggest political donors.

One of the companies was a biotech concern that was starting to develop a drug to treat avian flu. In March 2005, two weeks after buying about $5,000 of its shares, Mr. Obama took the lead in a legislative push for more federal spending to battle the disease.

The most recent financial disclosure form for Mr. Obama, an Illinois Democrat, also shows that he bought more than $50,000 in stock in a satellite communications business whose principal backers include four friends and donors who had raised more than $150,000 for his political committees.

A spokesman for Mr. Obama, who is seeking his party’s presidential nomination in 2008, said yesterday that the senator did not know that he had invested in either company until fall 2005, when he learned of it and decided to sell the stocks. He sold them at a net loss of $13,000.

The spokesman, Bill Burton, said Mr. Obama’s broker bought the stocks without consulting the senator, under the terms of a blind trust that was being set up for the senator at that time but was not finalized until several months after the investments were made.

“He went about this process to avoid an actual or apparent conflict of interest, and he had no knowledge of the stocks he owned,” Mr. Burton said. “And when he realized that he didn’t have the level of blindness that he expected, he moved to terminate the trust.”

Mr. Obama has made ethics a signature issue, and his quest for the presidency has benefited from the perception that he is unlike politicians who blend public and private interests. There is no evidence that any of his actions ended up benefiting either company during the roughly eight months that he owned the stocks.

Even so, the stock purchases raise questions about how he could unwittingly come to invest in two relatively obscure companies, whose backers happen to include generous contributors to his political committees. Among those donors was Jared Abbruzzese, a New York businessman now at the center of an F.B.I. inquiry into public corruption in Albany, who had also contributed to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group that sought to undermine John Kerry’s Democratic presidential campaign in 2004.

Mr. Obama, who declined to be interviewed about the stock deals, has already had to contend with a controversy that arose out of his reliance on a major campaign contributor in Chicago to help him in a personal financial transaction. In that earlier case, he acknowledged last year that it had been a mistake to involve the contributor, a developer who has since been indicted in an unrelated political scandal, in deals related to the Obamas’ purchase of a home.

Senate ethics rules do not prohibit lawmakers from owning stocks — even in companies that do business with the federal government or could benefit from legislation they advance — and indeed other members of Congress have investments in government contractors. The rules say only that lawmakers should not take legislative actions whose primary purpose is to benefit themselves.

Mr. Obama’s sale of his shares in the two companies ended what appears to have been a brief foray into highly speculative investing that stood out amid an otherwise conservative portfolio of mutual funds and cash accounts, a review of his Senate disclosure statements shows. He earned $2,000 on the biotech company, AVI BioPharma, and lost $15,000 on the satellite communications concern, Skyterra, according to Mr. Burton of the Obama campaign.

Mr. Burton said the trust was different from qualified blind trusts that other senators commonly used, because it was intended to allow him greater flexibility to address any accusations of conflicts that might arise from its assets. He said Mr. Obama had decided to sell the stocks after receiving a communication that made him concerned about how the trust was set up.

The investments came at a time when Mr. Obama was enjoying sudden financial success, following his victory at the polls in November 2004. He had signed a $1.9 million book deal, and his ethics disclosure reports show that he received $1.2 million of book money in 2005.

His wife, Michelle, a hospital vice president in Chicago, received a promotion that March, nearly tripling her salary to $317,000, and they bought a $1.6 million house in June. The house sat on a large property that was subdivided to make it more affordable, and one of Mr. Obama’s political donors bought the adjacent lot.

The disclosure forms show that the Obamas also placed several hundred thousand dollars in a new private-client account at JPMorgan Chase, a bond fund and a checking account at a Chicago bank.

But he put $50,000 to $100,000 into an account at UBS, which his aides say was recommended to him by a wealthy friend, George W. Haywood, who was also a major investor in both Skyterra and AVI BioPharma, public securities filings show.

Mr. Haywood and his wife, Cheryl, have contributed close to $50,000 to Mr. Obama’s campaigns and to his political action committee, the Hopefund. Mr. Haywood declined to comment.

Within two weeks of his purchase of the biotech stock that Feb. 22, Mr. Obama initiated what he has called “one of my top priorities since arriving in the Senate,” a push to increase federal financing to fight avian flu.

Several dozen people had already died from the disease in Southeast Asia, and experts were warning that a worldwide pandemic could kill tens of millions of people. Mr. Obama was one of the first political leaders to call for more money to head off the danger, which he described as an urgent public health threat.

His first step came on March 4, 2005, when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved his request for $25 million to help contain the disease in Asia; the full Senate later approved that measure. And in April 2005, he introduced a bill calling for more research on avian flu drugs and urging the government to increase its stockpiles of antiviral medicines.

Mr. Obama repeated this call in a letter that Aug. 9 to Michael O. Levitt, the health and human services secretary. And in September 2005, Mr. Obama and Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, succeeded in amending another bill to provide $3.8 billion for battling the flu.

Meanwhile, the drug company in which he invested, AVI BioPharma, had been working to develop its own medicine to treat avian flu victims. In a conference call with Wall Street analysts on March 8, 2005, the company’s chairman, Denis R. Burger, said the firm was “aggressively going forward” with its avian flu research and hoped to work with federal agencies on it.

The company, which is also developing medicines in a number of other areas, provided several updates on its avian flu research in 2005, including one on Oct. 21 saying the company was likely to develop a treatment for avian flu “in a relatively short time.”

Mr. Obama sold what appears to have been about 2,000 shares of the company’s stock a week later, when it traded at about $3.50 a share, or about $1 a share more than when he bought it. Company officials said they never talked to the senator about his work on avian flu. And while the company has received millions of dollars in federal money to develop drugs for treating ebola and other serious diseases, it still has not received any federal money for its avian flu research.

The company’s stock briefly surged to nearly $9 a share in January 2006 when it announced promising research findings on the flu drug. But the company still has not applied for federal approvals to test and market the drug.

Unlike his investment in AVI, which yielded a small profit, Mr. Obama’s stake in Skyterra Communications went in the opposite direction, despite a promising start.

He bought his Skyterra shares the same day the Federal Communications Commission ruled in favor of the company’s effort to create a nationwide wireless network by combining satellites and land-based communications systems. Immediately after that morning ruling, Tejas Securities, a regional brokerage in Texas that handled investment banking for Skyterra, issued a research report speculating that Skyterra stock could triple in value.

Tejas and people associated with it were major donors to Mr. Obama’s political committees, having raised more than $150,000 since 2004. The company’s chairman, John J. Gorman, has held fund-raisers for the senator in Austin, Tex., and arranged for him to use a private plane for several political events in 2005. Mr. Gorman declined to comment.

In May 2005, Mr. Abbruzzese, who was vice chairman of Tejas and a principal investor in Skyterra, contributed $10,000 along with his wife to Mr. Obama’s political action committee — a departure from his almost exclusive support of Republicans. Eight months earlier, for instance, he had contributed $5,000 to the Swift Boat group, and he has given $100,000 to the Republican National Committee since 2004.

Last year, Mr. Abbruzzese, a major investor in several high-tech companies in New York and elsewhere, emerged as a central figure in the federal investigation of the New York State Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno. The inquiry is examining Mr. Bruno’s personal business dealings, including whether he accepted money from Mr. Abbruzzese in return for Senate approval of grants for one of Mr. Abbruzzese’s companies. Both men have denied any wrongdoing. Mr. Abbruzzese did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Skyterra’s share price was lifted into the $40 range for a time on the strength of the F.C.C. ruling, but eventually drifted down into the low 30s, and was at $31 when Mr. Obama sold his shares for a $15,000 loss on Nov. 1, 2005. A few months later, it plunged into the $20 range, and today trades below $10 a share. A spokesman for Skyterra said the company’s top officials had not been aware of Mr. Obama’s investment.
MCAddict
14 years ago
Read today Rep. Issa (of Fast and Furious fame) is getting involved in this investigation. We're gonna' need a bigger Oversight Committee. [gonzo]
HockeyDad
14 years ago


Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said Tuesday that his committee plans to investigate government loan programs to private corporations in light of allegations of improper dealings between the White House and failed energy company Solyndra and wireless start-up LightSquared.

DrMaddVibe wrote:




CRAP!



Shred it! Flush it! Everybody scatter!

DrMaddVibe
14 years ago
Megyn Kelly Speaks With LightSquared Founder And ‘Democratic Donor’ Philip Falcone
Videoby Alex Alvarez | 5:54 pm, September 19th, 2011

Previously, we’d told you about early reports that Gen. William Shelton, head of the Air Force Space Command, had informed House members that he’d faced pressure from the Whit House to change his congressional testimony regarding Light Squared, a satellite and communications company owned by a prominent “Democratic donor” (you’ll see later on in this post how those initial reports, while true, were a bit misleading).

On America Live this afternoon, host Megyn Kelly reported on the LightSquared controversy by providing a timeline of events relating to the company. In February of 2005, she shared, President Obama invested up to $90,000 in a little-known firm named SkyTerra. In September of 2009, an investor named Philip Falcone (that’s the Democratic donor in question) met with the individual who would become LightSquared’s CEO at the White House. Then, in March of 2010, Falcone’s Harbinger Capital bought SkyTerra and became LightSquared. In January of this year, the FCC gave LightSquared the go-ahead to pursue its nation-wide wireless project. After Gen. Shelton’s says he felt pressured to present a more favorable testimony, a hearing was held, including testimony from a LightSquared executive. The FCC has since called for additional testing of the company’s wireless project to ensure it does not, as Gen. Shelton worries, interfere with military GPS systems. It was after all this that Shelton came forward with this revelation.

In an effort to get a clearer picture on everything that’s been going on, Kelly brought on Falcone himself. She got right to the nitty gritty asking Falcone (whom she referred to, in a moment of levity, as a “gazillionaire”) about criticism that the FCC may have been politically motivated to have looked the other way where LightSquared’s satellite communications project is concerned. There “a couple of things that I want to correct,” he said:

In your opening statement, you mentioned that I went down to see the President. I’ve never met the President. And he, apparently, acquired some stock back in 2005, 2006 and subsequently sold it. So, that’s irrelevant to what we’re talking about today.

I think the important thing to get across is that we were granted authorization of the spectrum and to use the spectrum to build out the nation-wide wireless network in 2005… Under the Bush administration. And subsequent to that is when I became involved. I became an investor and the more I understood about this company, the more I realized that it was a great asset. So, fast forward, now we’re in 2009, I made a bid to acquire the company. And this waiver that people are talking about… It’s irrelevant. Quite frankly, when we first approached the FCC, it was more of an interpretation of their waiver to acquire the company in 2010. So, we didn’t apply for a waiver. What everybody’s talking about does not affect the network. It’s all about the devices that we were trying to deploy.


Falcone responded to Kelly’s question about whether he would be willing to produce his and his company’s communication with the FCC by saying he was sure they would show that everything proceeded normally, but added that he’d have to “check with my counsel” about making these public.

The two also discuss whether it “looks bad” for the company to mention “fundraising” events in his correspondence. Falcone also mentioned that, surprise!, he’s actually a Republican and has given money to both Democratic and Republican campaigns in the past. Does this make it impossible for something less than ethical to have occurred between the company and the White House? Of course not. But it does offer an interesting additional wrinkle to the story, which looks like it’ll only continue to unfold as additional insight and details emerge.

Check out the full interview, via Fox News:


http://www.mediaite.com/tv/megyn-kelly-speaks-with-lightsquared-founder-and-democratic-donor-philip-falcone/ 
DrMaddVibe
14 years ago
House investigators have released an email showing executives of Solyndra, the bankrupt solar energy firm that received $535 million in government loan guarantees, broke their pledge to voluntarily testify before Congress at a day of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's choosing.

Originally, the company's president and chief executive, Brian Harrison, and W.G. Stover, Jr., its chief financial officer, were scheduled to testify as part of last Wednesday's hearing on questionable loans before the House Energy and Commerce's oversight subcommittee. That testimony was pushed back to this Friday, with the understanding, according to top committee members, that they would answer questions.

But yesterday, the executives informed the committee that they would be invoking their Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions. House Energy and Commerce Chairman Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., and oversight subcommittee chairman Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., said this violated "repeated assurances that they would testify voluntarily and answer questions." Today, they've released evidence backing up that view.

A letter sent by Solyndra's counsel on Saturday, Sept, 10, read, "As I discussed a few moments ago, the CEO of Solyndra, Brian Harrison will appear voluntarily and answer the Committee's questions on any day the Committee chooses, beginning next week and continuing thereafter. He will appear without any need to issue a subpoena. I respectfully request this delay for the reasons I described, particularly the possible benefit to the taxpayer."

In an earlier email sent to the committee on July 13, Harrison claimed Solyndra was "currently on track to meet the job creation commitments agreed upon with the (Department of Energy)" and touted the company as "an example of a U.S. company using American innovation and ingenuity to compete in the global solar market..."

Just over six weeks later, the company announced its intention to file for bankruptcy protection.



http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/email-shows-solyndra-execs-broke-pledge-testify 
DrMaddVibe
14 years ago
Soros turns up in Obama's LightSquared imbroglio
byTimothy P. Carney

As Republican lawmakers begin to dig into the White House's cozy relationship with a startup wireless company and the wealthy Democratic donor who owns it, a new character has appeared on the story's edges: liberal superdonor, conservative bete noire and controversial investor George Soros.

Soros reportedly invested in the telecom company LightSquared through a hedge fund, and many of the nonprofits he finances have backed LightSquared in regulatory and policy disputes.

The background:

LightSquared wants to compete with AT&T, Verizon and Sprint to provide mobile broadband (for instance, email and Internet on your Blackberry or iPhone).

Harbinger Capital Partners, a hedge fund run by billionaire financier Philip Falcone, owns LightSquared, and deftly steered the company through some tricky regulatory waters (with would-be competitors AT&T and Verizon fighting him along the way) to get preliminary approval for its plan to start a high-speed broadband wireless network.

Today, LightSquared is scuffling with the global positioning satellite industry, which argues that the company's current plan would interfere with GPS signals. Air Force Gen. William Shelton, head of Space Command, testified to Congress this month that giving LightSquared the radio frequencies it is slated to get would interfere with the military's GPS needs.

Here's the potential scandal: Ahead of Shelton's testimony, White House officials nudged Shelton to go easy on LightSquared, according to Daily Beast reporter Eli Lake. Shelton reportedly said that someone (presumably in the administration) had leaked the first draft of his testimony to LightSquared -- which Falcone denies.

Another government official said the White House pushed him to downplay the GPS worries.

Falcone is a big political donor who has given exclusively to Democrats and independents since Obama's election. Emails have surfaced showing LightSquared executives discussing donations to Obama's campaign in policy conversations with White House officials. Finally, there's the eye-catching detail that another Obama donor, George Haywood, steered then-Sen. Obama to invest $90,000 in the company (then named SkyTerra) back in 2005.

LightSquared's main lobbying firm is owned by Norman Brownstein, a major fundraiser for Obama's 2008 nominating convention.

Into this stew of lobbying, investments, regulation and influence, enter Soros.

Soros has long been a whipping boy for conservatives, in much the same way that free-market billionaires Charles and David Koch have become the target of liberals.

While Soros' influence is constantly and grossly exaggerated by conservatives, it's still real. He generously funds a huge swath of the liberal movement, and has aligned his business interests with Obama's big-government policies. For instance, Obama green-energy official Cathy Zoi left the Energy Department earlier this year to help run a new green-energy (and thus subsidy-dependent) investment fund Soros was starting.

In the LightSquared affair, Soros shows up repeatedly.

First, Soros is reportedly an investor in LightSquared. The Wall Street Journal reported in November 2010: "In 2009, while some investors were asking for withdrawals, others were lining up to put money into Harbinger. They included Soros Fund Management, which during the past year became a significant new investor, say people familiar with the matter."

I asked about this, but a Soros spokesman emailed me, "As a matter of policy, we don't confirm or deny information on our investments."

Additionally, the telecom- and tech-related liberal nonprofits Soros funds have gone to bat for LightSquared in its various policy fights. In April 2010, the Public Interest Spectrum Coalition filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission backing Harbinger's business plans and met with an FCC commissioner on the matter. Four groups that belong to that coalition received six-figure gifts from Soros' Open Society Institute the year before.

Six months later, those four Soros-funded groups -- Free Press, Media Access Project, the New America Foundation, and Public Knowledge -- filed a joint comment backing LightSquared in a related regulatory matter.

Donations from a politically interested billionaire, of course, do not make an activist group a "front" for the billionaire's business interest. In fact, the unseemly fundraising-****-lobbying emails were unearthed this year by the Center for Public Integrity, which Soros funded early last decade. And one profile, by liberal writer Jane Mayer, painted a picture of Soros almost as a rich sucker rather than a scheming moneyman.

Still, as Congress begins looking into the politics behind LightSquared's regulatory victories, it's worth asking if Soros, the Left's leading donor, played a role in the affair.

Timothy P.Carney, The Examiner's senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Monday and Thursday, and his stories and blog posts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.


http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/article/soros-turns-obamas-lightsquared-imbroglio 
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