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Government Corruption

Granholm Energy Department gave California utilities $600M, now she'll sit on their boards

2025-02-24

[JustTheNews] During her tenure at the DOE, former Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was accused of a number of widely reported potential ethics violations, including conflicts of interest and using her official position to promote companies in which she purportedly had a financial stake or relationship.

Former Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced on Thursday that she will be joining the boards of directors for Southern California Edison Company and its parent corporation Edison International, one of the largest utility companies in the U.S. This comes just six months after Granholm's Department of Energy awarded $600 million to a consortium of California utilities, including Southern California Edison.

During her tenure at the DOE, Granholm was accused of a number of ethics violations, including conflicts of interest and using her official position to promote companies that she had a financial stake or relationship with. Nonetheless, despite the widespread reporting of her controversial tenure, she was never charged or disciplined for any wrongdoing.

EARLY PRAISE, LATER INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING
Following her nomination and through her confirmation hearings, the legacy media showered Granholm with favorable press, calling her a “champion” of “clean” energy policies and the climate agenda. Despite the early praise by climate-focused news publications, her tenure was marred by controversy and ethics questions.

In May 2021, four months after Granholm’s confirmation hearing, it was reported that she had held shares in Proterra, an electric bus company that the Biden-Harris administration had heavily promoted. According to the Associated Press, she told congress in 2023 that "she mistakenly provided false information about her family’s stock holdings" in testimony that year. Graholm had by then divested of those shares, earning a profit of $1.6 million, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

In April 2021, Granholm had told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that she owned no individual stocks and only invested in mutual funds. In February 2023, U.S. ethics officials, The Wall Street Journal reported, warned top officials at the Energy Department, including Granholm, that they or their family members owned stocks that could violate conflict-of-interest rules.

In June of 2023, Granholm confirmed to the Committee on Energy & Natural Resources that she had owned stocks in six companies, which U.S. ethics officials had judged to be “non-conflicting.” Her husband had a previously undisclosed investment in Ford Motor Company. She said in a letter to the Energy and Natural Resources Committee that she had “mistakenly” testified she didn’t own any individual stocks. The committee took no further action.

Proterra went bankrupt in August 2023, and left transit districts across the country with broken buses that couldn’t be repaired.

In 2023 Granholm suffered embarrassment after a widely touted "EV Road Trip" turned into a PR disaster. Planning to fast-charge her caravan of EVs — including a luxury Cadillac Lyriq, a hefty Ford F-150 and an affordable Bolt electric utility vehicle — her advance team realized there weren’t going to be enough plugs to go around.

The embarrassment started when, according to reports, "one of the station’s four chargers was broken, and others were occupied. So an Energy Department staffer tried parking a nonelectric vehicle by one of those working chargers to reserve a spot for the approaching secretary of energy. A family with a baby, in need of the blocked spot, objected to the Energy Department’s misuse of energy infrastructure and public vehicles. The parents called 911. "

INVESTIGATIONS AND CALLS TO RESIGN
Shortly after the revelations, Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., who was ranking member of the committee at the time, called for the inspector general to investigate Granholm’s alleged conflicts of interest. In April, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., called for her resignation over the matter. House Republicans on the Oversight Committee also investigated Graholm’s investments in Proterra.

More than a dozen public interest groups also called for Granholm’s resignation. In an August 2023 letter to Joe Biden, the groups cited her failure to report financial holdings, involvement in actions that benefited companies she was connected to, as well as other ethically questionable actions the groups argued would justify her removal from office.

Among the signatories was government watchdog group Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT). The group used a Freedom of Information Act Request to obtain Graholm’s calendar. Among the previously unknown meetings discovered in the document were Graholm’s meetings between billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates. The DOE authorized up to $2 billion in a 50-50 cost-share program for Gates’ Terra Power Natrium reactor in Wyoming.

Posted by:Skidmark

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