Obama’s 'Crony-Gate' Scandal Widens - Billions Now Under Scrutiny

Allegations that White House aides attempted to pressure an Air Force general to alter his congressional testimony in order to aid a firm controlled by a prominent Democratic donor lent new momentum Friday to GOP complaints that “crony capitalism” contributed to the Obama stimulus programs’ failure to revive the economy.

Instead of the money being spent wisely, they ggest, billions were squandered by an administration that believed it could reward its political backers without impeding the economic recovery.

They point to the loss of over 1,100 jobs when the now-defunct solar-panel firm Solyndra, which received over half a billion dollars in federal stimulus dollars, closed its doors.

“Crony capitalism was responsible for the failure of the stimulus — about $90 billion went to clean energy,” Tom Borelli, a PhD and director of the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project, told Newsmax on Friday.

News that four-star Gen. William Shelton was urged to change his testimony to make it more favorable to a firm with close ties to the White House adds to the narrative of an administration singularly focused on helping its political friends.

Those allegations come in the same week as a congressional probe continued into loan guarantees given to Solyndra over the objections of Office and Management and Budget staff who warned the company had yet to demonstrate a viable business model.

President Barack Obama later hailed the Solyndra initiative as a model example of how green-energy jobs could help bail out the U.S. economy.

The Republican in charge of the Solyndra probe, Oversight and Investigations subcommittee chairman Rep. Cliff Stearns, told Newsmax Thursday that Solyndra’s “enormous amount of expenditures would mean there’s apt to be fraud, there’s apt to be shall we say, crony capitalism because a lot of people were moving too quickly and spending too much money and not carefully assessing its value and its importance to the development of the solar panel.”

Conservative think tanks and pundits are positioning Solyndra and the Shelton testimony as just the tip of a much larger problem: An administration all too eager to manipulate the levers of federal power and largess in order to reward its political supporters. Among the examples being cited:

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