Early next month, Solyndra will auction off its assets — including thousands of pieces of office equipment, computers, power tools, assembly line machinery and even solar panels. That should help taxpayers recoup their money — money that should never have been loaned to Solyndra in the first place. Right? Wrong.

Scribe’s Lachlan Markay explains that the proceeds of the auction will all go to … private investors.

DOE has developed an unprecedented interpretation of the law to allow Solyndra’s private investors to recoup $75 million of their investment before taxpayers are repaid.

Heritage Global Partners, which is conducting the auction, told Scribe that the money raised from the upcoming auction “will not be anywhere near” $75 million, meaning the proceeds will go entirely towards repaying Solyndra’s private investors.

That’s highly atypical. According to testimony from two Treasury Department officials, before Solyndra, taxpayers have never been subordinated to private investors in the repayment of a government loan.

Let’s think this through for a minute. Why was Solyndra presumably picked to be the poster child for the government’s foolish loan guarantee program in the first place? I seem to recall some overlap between Solyndra investors and Obama donors. So, naturally, the DOE would want to repay those donors before they repay the taxpayers whose money they irresponsibly invested. This pay-to-play scandal is so transparent I barely know what to say. Yet, Obama continues to defend his decision — no less than he continues to defend Eric Holder’s ability to preside over an investigation into Fast and Furious. Shameless.