Did energy secretary Jennifer Granholm lie to Congress?
- June 14, 2023
Energy secretary Jennifer Granholm has admitted to misleading Congress, in an apparent violation of the US Code that can carry a sentence of up to five years to prison.
In a Friday news dump filled just hours after the news of former president Donald Trump’s indictment, Granholm confessed to making a false statement before the Senate Energy and National Resources Committee on April 20.
At issue is Granholm telling Senator Josh Hawley that she owns no individual stocks, “whereas I should have said that I did not own any conflicting stocks,” she wrote in a letter shared with E&E News. Granholm also said she failed to disclose that her husband Daniel Mulhern owned thousands of dollars of Ford stock while her department plowed hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts into the auto company, an admission that is, at minimum, ethically dubious.
For some, these new revelations cast Granholm’s previous work in an even more troublesome light. Michael Chamberlain, the executive director of Protect the Public’s Trust, filed a complaint against Granholm after watching her dole out contracts to companies tied to Proterra, the electric vehicle battery company on whose board she sat of and that she owned millions of dollars of stock in. That same day, Granholm handed out tens of millions of dollars in contracts to Ford, in which her husband owned thousands of dollars of stock.
Chamberlain notes that Granholm’s Ford lovefest looks highly problematic in light of this news. “When we filed our complaint against Secretary Granholm for participating in a grant that awarded funds to companies tied to Proterra, little did we know it was much, much worse,” he told The Spectator. “This is Ethics 101. Any investments he has are imputed to her, so it is just as if she owned this stock herself.”