Harry Reid’s Hypocrisy

Will the Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) hypocrisy never end? Reid [and now Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)] have caused an MSM firestorm over Mitt Romney’s taxes. George Will, on ABC’s This Week said:

“Harry Reid’s source, if we are to assume that he has one, is identified by Harry Reid as an investor in Bain. That’s as though I owned some Microsoft, which I do, and I said, ‘Well, as an investor in Microsoft I now have an opinions on Bill Gates’ tax return.'”

Will said that it is absurd to trust a Bain investor as a reliable source on Mitt Romney’s tax situation.

But that is not the only hypocrisy that Reid has been up to, not by a long shot!

In December, 2010, it was revealed that Reid (and other Democrats) helped a Chinese company get $450 million of stimulus money to build and operate a wind farm in west Texas, and the farm’s electric turbines would be built in China. At that time, the wind farm project was to save or create 300 jobs in Texas, as well as 2000 manufacturing jobs in China. The Spinning Star wind farm consists of 300 2-megawatt wind turbines. Spinning Star is being built by a joint partnership between the US Renewable Energy Group, a Dallas investment firm with strong ties to the Democrat Party, and A-Power Energy Generation Systems, a Chinese supplier of wind turbines.

That was bad enough, but Reid’s reelection campaign received thousands of dollars in donations from the wind farm’s backers.

Not content to stir up tax trouble, Reid has recently done two other things. He has criticized Nevada Energy for not doing enough to support “green” energy, and he is helping out a Chinese solar firm, ENN Mojave Energy LLC, that is represented by his son, Rory Reid.

Reid said that the ENN Mojave Energy LLC, a billion dollar project planned for Laughlin, NV, “would start tomorrow if NV Energy would purchase the power,” but the company “has not been willing to work on this and that’s such a shame.” Reid also said, “NV Energy is a regulated monopoly. They control 95 percent of all the electricity that is produced in Nevada and they should go along with this.”

But there are two problems with what Reid says. NV Energy reported in April, 2012, that it had exceeded its state-imposed green-energy purchase requirement of 15 percent by purchasing 16.7 percent of its power from renewable sources. And the ENN Mojave Energy LLC project is hampered by a lack of green power customers.

Now we find that Rory Reid, son of Senator Harry Reid, is an attorney at Lionel, Sawyer & Collins, the law firm that is representing ENN Mojave Energy LLC. Coincidence? A Senator Reid spokeswoman said that he did not suggest Rory Reid’s firm to ENN. This is an undeniable conflict of interest for the senator. Using a standard that Reid has set in the US Senate, the burden of proof about the recommendation (or lack of it) is on Reid. Perhaps tax returns from Senator Reid and his son can shed some light on this situation.

But that’s just my opinion.

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