Pelosi: It's Just a Weird Coincidence My Brother-in-Law is a VP for Solar Company That Received $737 Million From Obama

She insists her brother-in-law has nothing to do with any of this, it's all just some odd coincidence. That damn Matt Drudge and those evil conservative bloggers are just riling people up or something.

Department of Energy officials and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi have slammed as absurd reports from conservative blogs that inflated the connection between Pelosi's brother-in-law and a Nevada solar power project that received a $737 million federal government loan guarantee this week.

SolarReserve, based in Santa Monica, received the loan guarantee to build a 110-megawatt solar-thermal plant in Tonopah, Nev., that will use the sun's heat to create steam to drive a turbine.

Among SolarReserve's investors is Pacific Corporate Group, a private-equity firm headquartered in La Jolla (San Diego County). Ronald Pelosi, the brother-in-law of the House Democratic leader and a former president of San Francisco's Board of Supervisors, is an executive with the firm.

That connection was enough for a blog at the conservative Weekly Standard to erroneously trumpet the headline, "Crony Capitalism: $737 million loan given to Pelosi's brother-in-law."

Drudge Report, the widely read conservative online aggregator, picked up the story and soon conservative media circles were ablaze with what they thought was the next Solyndra - the failed Fremont solar firm that received a $528 million federal loan.

The story disappeared from the Drudge site by Thursday afternoon.

It "disappeared" because he rotates headlines. That doesn't make the story any less true. Supposedly, this is a "fake" scandal or something.