Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama's Washington

by Sharyl Attkisson

  In the end, a Fisker spokesman put the number of actual total car sales before bankruptcy at around 1,800.

  How could the government experts have been so wrong? Were these failed enterprises alone among an overwhelming body of successful green energy initiatives funded by tax dollars? No.

  Which raises larger questions of public interest. Was it appropriate for Secretary Chu to take on the role of venture capitalist? What do the failures say about our leaders’ judgment and business acumen? Should the government have the right, whether motivated by political interests, ideology, or the best of intentions, to commit a great deal of tax dollars to projects on which few savvy private sector investors would gamble?

  Substitution Game: Imagine a parallel scenario in which President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney personally appeared at groundbreakings for, and used billions of tax dollars to support, multiple giant corporate ventures whose investors were sometimes major political campaign bundlers, only to have one (or two, or three) go bankrupt. At a cost to taxpayers of hundreds of millions of dollars. During a presidential election. When they knew in advance the companies’ credit ratings were junk. News headlines would have been relentless with images of Bush and Cheney smiling and waving at one construction-start ceremony after another, making their invalidated claims about jobs and untold millions . . . contrasted with images of empty plants and boarded-up warehouses. And I would have been proposing those stories.

  For example, the media didn’t hesitate—nor should it have—to contrast Bush’s 2005, “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job” with his administration’s disastrous handling of Hurricane Katrina. Seeming to be wildly disconnected from the facts, the president was prematurely congratulating his Federal Emergency Management Agency director, Michael Brown, for a job well done. Brown resigned ten days later amid the failures and devastation. The disparity was evoked time and time again—rightfully so—by the likes of the Washington Post, CNN, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, Mother Jones, Huffington Post, the Weekly Standard, USA Today, ABC, CBS, NBC, the Daily Beast: you name it.

  But there isn’t the same hankering to show the Obama-Biden contrasts.

  Obama officials argued that it was no great scandal for some of these endeavors to prove to be poor investments: that the whole point was for the government to subsidize and encourage worthy projects that wouldn’t otherwise merit private support. They argued that the losses weren’t really losses because Congress had set aside $2.4 billion in a fund to pay for any failures.

  Think about what they’re really saying, in simple terms:

  We’re using $90 billion of your money to promote clean energy. Some of it will be loaned to companies that are so risky, nobody in their right mind (besides the government) would support them. But don’t worry! When they default on the loans, and they will, we’ll call it “even” by subtracting the losses from a $2.4 billion fund we’re setting up in advance. With your tax dollars. How’s that sound?

  If you’re a consumer of ordinary news, you probably didn’t hear much about any of this. You probably thought the clean energy money scandal began and ended with Solyndra.

  I first began looking into green investments after Solyndra’s death, complete with an FBI raid, in September 2011. Two years earlier, the Energy Department had granted the solar panel maker a loan guarantee backed by more than a half-billion tax dollars—that’s five hundred and thirty-five million dollars to a single company. Within six months, accountant PricewaterhouseCoopers stated that Solyndra had fiscal problems that were so serious, there was “substantial doubt about its ability to continue.” But when President Obama visited the company two months later, in May 2010, he remained publicly bullish on its future.

  What would I find if I dug into other investments?

  Following the green energy money was a natural outgrowth of the reporting I’d already done on boondoggles associated with the Obama administration’s 2009 stimulus plan, which was a natural outgrowth of my reporting on the 2008 Bush administration’s Troubled Asset Relief Plan, or TARP, which was a natural outgrowth of my investigations into wasteful congressional earmarks. The common denominator? Questionable spending of billions of hard-earned American tax dollars.

  The numbers are staggering. As a presidential candidate, Obama campaigned on a $190 billion stimulus plan to revive the economy. Once elected, he decided vastly more money was needed: four times his original proposal. So in 2009, Congress passed his $787 billion stimulus package—and later upped it to $840 billion in 2012. For comparison, Bush’s TARP started out with a massive $700 billion in funding but Congress reduced it to $475 billion in July 2010. President Obama’s stimulus was nearly double, and $90 billion of that was directly earmarked for green energy.

  I began poring through the backgrounds of some troubled green ventures that benefited from federal tax dollars, whether under Bush or Obama. Documents filed with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission proved to be a gold mine of information that had not been widely reported. One after another, I discovered business plans built on flimsy foundations formulated by entrepreneurs who had little to no experience in the specialty. Millions upon millions of dollars were handed over to companies facing financial difficulties or with a history of making poor decisions. In some instances, the government secretly knew in advance that it was committing tax dollars to firms so risky, their bonds were rated as “junk”—below investment grade with a significant threat of default.

  | MORE SOLYNDRAS?

  My first investigation into the subject of green energy taxpayer waste aired January 13, 2012, during the debut week of the latest reinvention of CBS’s morning broadcast. At the time, the program was looking for hard-hitting, original reporting and this fit the bill.

  Among other facts, the story discussed what the Energy Department knew about green energy storage company Beacon Power before committing $43 million in tax money to it:

  Documents obtained by CBS News show Standard & Poor’s had confidentially given the project a dismal outlook of CCC+.

  “[I]t is not even a good junk bond,” said economist Peter Morici. “It’s well below investment grade. This level of bond has about a seventy percent chance of failing in the long term.”

  In fact, Beacon did go bankrupt. . . . We count twelve green energy companies that are having trouble after being approved for more than $6.5 billion in federal assistance. Five have filed for bankruptcy.

  As my research would reveal in the coming months, twelve troubled companies was only the beginning.

  I presented the story live on the set in New York and was there after the broadcast when the staff celebrated the end of a successful first week of the new CBS This Morning. CBS News chairman Jeff Fager was on hand and had just signed me to a new three-year contract. He hugged me and held on long enough to whisper in my ear that the story was remarkably strong. “That’s just what we’re looking for,” he told me. “We want as many as you can do . . . just like that.”

  Obama administration officials were still mired in damage control over my ongoing Fast and Furious coverage. Adding green energy to my portfolio apparently whipped them into a panic. My White House handler, Schultz, was now spinning on both stories.

  The administration had declined my requests for on-camera interviews for the CBS This Morning investigation. But after the fact, its response was predictably multipronged and indefatigable. It included a long letter of objection replete with mistakes that largely argued points not addressed and claims never made in the report. When CBS replied that the story was entirely accurate so no corrections were warranted, the administration turned to its unwavering partner in uncritically advancing its agenda: Media Matters. The liberal blog printed the administration’s error-riddled spin point by point repeating nearly the exact language and format that the administration had used in its letter to CBS.

  As a news organization, we actively choos
e not to elevate the spinners and the media surrogates by publicly taking part in their propaganda games. But to disengage often means leaving the record muddled by their false information and innuendo, which tends to then miraculously place in the top result spots in subsequent Google searches, where less-informed readers might mistakenly believe they’ve located a legitimate news source.

  I’m accustomed to the PR campaign. But not everyone is. I get the sense that some colleagues and supervisors in the story chain would rather not deal with it. They want to be patted on the back by the administration after a story, not criticized and taken to task. Some of them have friendly relationships with people connected to the administration and don’t like catching flak from them after a story like mine. Frankly, that’s what the White House counts on. It’s why they do what they do.

  Sometimes, we oblige by going so far as to give favored political interests special access.

  During the 2012 presidential campaign, Obama Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner was afforded the chance to meet with and spin network news managers off camera. According to those who attended, Geithner pretty much blamed all of the nation’s economic troubles on—the drought. His analysis became a basis for subsequent CBS Evening News story decisions that advanced the drought theory of economic weakness, helpfully pinpointing a factor outside the president’s control and, therefore, one for which he could not be blamed. Naturally, this advanced Obama’s case rather than that of his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney.

  Corporate interests can rate access, too. In 2008, after word leaks out about the government’s secret settlement of a vaccine-related autism injury in the Hannah Poling case, vaccine makers and their government partners are working overtime to controversialize and tamp down all news coverage of the facts. Their strategy includes a full-forced attack on me and my ongoing reporting. I’m especially dangerous to their interests because my reporting on medical issues cannot accurately be portrayed as fringe or lacking in credibility. After all, it’s been cited in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Columbia Journalism Review. My reporting has received an Emmy nomination and a finalist award from the independent Investigative Reporters and Editors organization.

  But I learn in June 2008, after the fact, that PR officials and a top attorney for vaccine maker Wyeth have managed to get a private meeting to spin two Evening News senior producers in New York about my reports. (One of the pharmaceutical PR officals is former ABC and CNN reporter Eileen O’Connor, who now works at the State Department under President Obama.) It’s wrong on so many levels, in my opinion. Improper for the meeting to be conducted without my participation or knowledge. Unethical to offer the powerful corporate interests—who are also advertisers—special access, while those on the other side aren’t given an audience to be heard. Inappropriate because the producers haven’t been in the chain of command on any of my vaccine-related stories.

  | THE BIG CHILL

  After my first green energy investigation on CBS This Morning, which was so well received (except by the Obama administration and its supporters), the idea for my next report came from a CBS investigative producer in New York, Laura Strickler, who was also looking into government-funded green energy projects. She identified two companies that received a combined $300 million under the stimulus program to build electric car batteries at plants in Michigan. The money was supposed to grow the U.S. economy and level the playing field with foreign competitors. But most Americans probably didn’t know that one of the companies, Dow Kokam, was a Korean partnership. The other, LG Chem, was Korean owned. The firms used their American stimulus funds to buy Korean technology, equipment, and supplies, and they filled some of those sought-after American stimulus jobs with Korean workers. This so angered the local labor unions that they openly criticized the Obama administration for allowing foreigners to receive benefits that they felt were meant for Americans. On top of all that, the plants were already said to be behind schedule.

  Unable to get the answers they sought from the Obama administration and their members of Congress, the local labor unions filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking for payroll records of contractors performing LG Chem’s construction. The government’s response named eighteen companies, and at least eleven of them were Asian firms.

  By any neutral measure, this was a terrific story and illustrative of other cases we’d identified where green energy stimulus funds were benefiting players outside the United States, including China. So we went full speed ahead with producing the story.

  Strickler accomplished the nearly impossible, convincing the labor unions to go on camera with their gripes about the Obama administration. And we worked for several weeks to obtain crucial visual components: undercover photographs and video of Korean workers inside the plants allegedly performing nonspecialized tasks that could be done by Americans. Nobody from the companies would agree to interviews or disclose how many Koreans they’d flown in altogether, but one had acknowledged in the local news that it had 150 of the foreign workers on site at one point, so we knew the number wasn’t inconsequential.

  The resulting story is a natural to be next in the series I plan to offer for CBS This Morning, since the first report was so popular. But when Strickler and I propose it, the broadcast takes a pass. Astonished, I push for an explanation why. I’m told it’s too similar to my last story. It’s an absurd notion. The previous story had recounted a litany of clean energy financial woes. This one explored the idea of foreign-owned companies benefiting from the stimulus funds, angering labor unions. The stories aren’t remotely the same. There’s some other dynamic at play. I’m left to wonder what.

  Next, we approach the CBS Evening News. It’s already widely understood that the current managers have a lack of interest in the investigative reporting that was once a staple of the broadcast. But this story is so powerful, we’re hopeful that it will transcend that posture. Strickler hand-delivers the script to executive producer Shevlin in the New York newsroom. Afterward, Strickler calls me in Washington to report the response.

  “I hardly know what to say,” Strickler tells me.

  Sounding perplexed, she says that Shevlin was unreceptive to the story, objecting, among other things, to the phrase “foreign workers.”

  “What are we supposed to call them?” I ask.

  We brainstorm for a moment, wondering how use of the word foreign in this context could be seen as pejorative or politically incorrect. We decide that Shevlin could be looking to call the foreign workers something like ‘non-American workers.’

  “That’s awkward. What else?” I say.

  Shevlin also doesn’t want us to call them “Koreans,” Strickler tells me, suggesting that we go with something like “Korean nationals.”

  These are nitpicks that can be easily resolved.

  “What’s the real problem?” I ask.

  Strickler says Shevlin really didn’t have many suggested changes; she just hated the whole thing. She doesn’t like the whole idea of the story. Shevlin feels that even if Koreans were given jobs, some Americans got jobs, too, so she doesn’t think there’s a story.

  “Why not let people make up their own minds?” I argue rhetorically. “Some will feel the way she does; others may not. What counts is that we put the news out there and let people decide for themselves.”

  Strickler listens politely. But I know from experience that Evening News is a dead end.

  Next, we offer the story to the Weekend News, which often draws a large audience and can be a great platform for diverse subject matter. The executive producer of that broadcast watches the video of our completed report and calls me on the phone from New York. She’s effusive.

  “First of all, I just want to say thank you for bringing me this story. It’s incredible! Really brilliant! I mean, it’s just so outrageous! Weekend News would love to have it.”

  She schedules it for that weekend. Before we han
g up, she asks, “Why doesn’t Evening want it? I mean, it’s such a strong story!”

  “You’ll have to ask them,” I say.

  Apparently, she does.

  A couple of days go by and nobody initiates the usual email traffic that precedes a story going on air. So I check on the status with the executive producer.

  “We’re going to rescreen the piece,” she tells me.

  Rescreen it?

  That means she plans to view it again in the presence of unnamed advisors, even though she’d already watched it and said that she loved it. Again, from experience, this telegraphs a familiar signal: somebody doesn’t want the story to air.

  “Why would you rescreen it—unless you’re thinking of not running it?” I ask.

  On the spot, she grasps for reasons.

  “It just feels a little dated and old, I mean they broke ground on these plants months ago.”

  I counter. “No, it’s not old; it’s current. The plants aren’t even open yet. The controversy is happening now, with the unions objecting to Koreans being brought in to work. Who are on site. Now.”