“Secretary Chu is a wonderful and brilliant man,” Obama 2008 Issues Director Dan Carol wrote to then-White House Chief of Staff Peter Rouse in a memo earlier this year, “but he is not perfect for the other critical DOE mission: deploying existing technologies at scale and creating jobs.”
Rouse ultimately rejected Carol’s call to replace Chu, but Chu did nothing to assuage doubts about his competence at today’s Solyndra hearing. At one point Subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., even read through all the issues Secretary Chu plead ignorance on today:
We talked about the August 2009 email predicting Solyndra would be out of cash in September 2011. You knew about that but you didn’t seem to know about that.
The PricewaterhouseCoopers concerns about Solyndra, you didn’t seem real concerned or weren’t aware of it.
The White House emailing your chief of staff regarding their concerns with the PricewaterhouseCoopers report, you didn’t seem to know too much about your chief of staff’s awareness of that.
Request to hold off announcement of the DOE loan, and request by your agency to Solyndra to hold off on announcing layoffs till after the midterm election, you don’t have any recollection of this.
So what I am saying is that through all of this you seem to have an unawareness.
It may have seemed like a stroke of genius to put a Nobel Prize winner in charge of the Energy Department. Obama, like Chu, probably wishes he had a time machine to make that decision over again.
