Telecom executive Donald H. Gips raised a big bundle of cash to help finance his friend Barack Obama’s run for the presidency.

Gips, a vice president of Colorado-based Level 3 Communications LLC, delivered more than $500,000 in contributions for the Obama war chest, while two fellow senior company executives collected at least $150,000 more.

After the election, Gips was put in charge of hiring in the Obama White House, helping to place loyalists and fundraisers in many key positions. Then in mid-2009, the new president named him ambassador to South Africa. Level 3 Communications, in which Gips retained stock, meanwhile received millions of dollars of government stimulus contracts for broadband projects in six states—though Gips said he was "completely unaware" of the stimulus money.

More than two years after President Obama took office vowing to banish “special interests” from his administration, nearly 200 of his biggest donors have landed plum government jobs and advisory posts, won federal contracts worth millions of dollars for their business interests or attended numerous elite White House meetings and social events, an investigation by iWatch News has found.

These “bundlers” raised at least $50,000 and sometimes more than $500,000 in campaign donations for Obama’s campaign. Many of those in the “Class of 2008” are now being asked to bundle contributions for Obama’s re-election, an effort that could cost $1 billion.

As a candidate, Obama spoke passionately about diminishing the clout of moneyed interests and making the White House more accessible to everyday Americans. In kicking off his presidential run on Feb. 10, 2007, he blasted “the cynics, the lobbyists, the special interests,” who he said had “turned our government into a game only they can afford to play.”

They are two cutting-edge electric car makers, headquartered in California and backed by powerhouses of politics and money. In 2009, each secured half-billion dollar loan commitments from President Obama’s Department of Energy to help transform their clean-energy cars from drawing boards to showrooms.

But this week, the fortunes of Tesla Motors and Fisker Automotive took sharply divergent turns.

On Wednesday, the Energy Department announced that Tesla repaid the balance of its $465 million government loan nine years early. Fisker, meantime, has ceased making cars as it weighs potential bankruptcy, confronts a $171 million loan balance with DOE and, last month, faced questions from the House Committee on Oversight & Government Reform.

In October 2011, The Center for Public Integrity and ABC News explored the Energy Department’s risky $1 billion bet on two companies lauded for their innovative design, but facing warnings from experts over the marketability of cars that, in some models, carry price tags hovering around six figures.

In announcing Tesla’s loan repayment this week, the department said the risks were worth taking, coming at a time the industry itself suffered a deep downturn. “The lack of financing for the automotive industry was critical and potentially lethal,” Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said in a statement. “Providing these loans was a calculated risk — but it was the right decision for the country.”

A Department of Energy loan program, infused with $25 billion to spur a wave of fuel-efficient vehicles, has not closed a loan in two years and is likely to leave two-thirds of the money unspent amid fallout over the Solyndra debacle and other factors.

Those findings, revealed Friday in a U.S. Government Accountability Office report, rekindle questions over how effectively the Energy Department picks winners and losers for its lucrative green energy portfolio.

The audit focuses on DOE loan programs, including one known as ATVM — the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program.

That program was pitched as part of a broader government campaign to spur innovative, clean technologies that would both rev up the economy and clean the environment. Under ATVM, the government would help bankroll electric cars and other fuel-saving initiatives; this seed money would, in turn, trigger a domino effect for industry and consumers.

Yet the last loan closed in March 2011, and just $8.4 billion has been spent so far in five projects.

The money, records show, helped stalwarts Ford Motor Co. and Nissan North America transform factories to build fuel-efficient vehicles, and cutting-edge upstarts Tesla Motors and Fisker Automotive develop electric cars and plug-in hybrids. A smaller loan went to a Miami company to develop wheelchair-accessible vehicles to run on compressed natural gas.

Yet not all the projects have found success.

NEW YORK — The Center for Public Integrity and ABC News were awarded an Emmy Award Monday for their yearlong investigation exposing flaws in a U.S. government green energy program meant to boost new and innovative technologies.

Center senior investigative reporter Ronnie Greene and a team from ABC were honored for Green Energy: Contracts, Connections and the Collapse of Solyndra, a series of reports exploring  how the Department of Energy awarded lucrative green energy contracts. The coverage detailed breakdowns in the award to solar panel maker Solyndra Inc., which later filed for bankruptcy, and examined connections between Obama campaign bundlers and the DOE.

The prestigious News & Documentary Emmy Awards, presented Monday at Lincoln Center's Rose Hall, honored the Center and ABC for Outstanding Business and Economic Reporting. The ABC team included producer Matthew Mosk and chief investigative reporter Brian Ross.

Click here to read ABC’s story. Watch the segment by ABC World News with Diane Sawyer here.

The Department of Energy knew its $535 million loan guarantee to solar-panel maker Solyndra Inc. was “a bad bet from the beginning” but was “determined to make Solyndra a stimulus success story at any cost,” the Republican-led House Energy and Commerce Committee concluded in a report released Thursday.

Solyndra failed last year. The committee’s 154-page report follows its approval Wednesday of the No More Solyndras Act, which would disband the DOE loan guarantee program. The bill would also bar any guarantees for applications received after 2011 and require additional reviews by the Treasury Department and Congress for pending and existing loans.

Solyndra, a California-based renewable energy firm and favorite of the Obama White House, received the administration's first loan guarantee in 2009 and was held out as an example of the “promise of clean energy” by the president. Within two years, the company had filed for bankruptcy, firing 1,100 employees in the process.

The Center for Public Integrity and ABC News first reported on the Solyndra loan guarantee in May 2011, revealing that the DOE had rushed to back the firm without fully vetting its economic prospects. The investigation also noted that billionaire George Kaiser, one of Obama’s principal backers in the 2008 elections, was a major Solyndra shareholder.

The Energy and Commerce Committee report reflects an 18-month investigation into the DOE-Solyndra affair, presenting what it calls “a complete picture of the facts and circumstances” surrounding the White House, DOE, Solyndra, and investors like Kaiser.

The Energy Department kept Treasury Department officials in the dark until late in the government's review of the $535 million loan to now-bankrupt solar panel maker Solyndra, triggering a rushed consultation that may have left concerns unresolved, a new audit released Wednesday found.

The audit by the Treasury Department’s inspector general found that Treasury officials had raised serious concerns about the terms of the loan, but there was no documentation of whether they were addressed. The report’s findings of hurried reviews and ignored warning signs echo previous iWatch News reporting on Solyndra.

The loan, originally touted as a model of President Obama’s green energy program, has become a political weapon. “The Treasury report echoes what our investigation has shown over and over; Solyndra was a bad bet from the beginning that was rushed out the door while every red flag was ignored,” Republican Reps. Fred Upton and Cliff Stearns said in a statement Wednesday.

Though the Energy Department arranged the loan, it was actually processed by the Federal Financing Bank, a government lending institution under Treasury’s control. The newly released audit found that Treasury was not involved in the process until the loan negotiations were largely complete.

Treasury officials raised concerns about the terms of the loan, including the fact that it included a 100 percent guarantee, rather than a partial guarantee, auditors found. After a conference call with Energy Department officials, one Treasury official wrote, in an email uncovered by auditors, “we pressed on certain issues … but the train really has left the station on this deal.”

The Department of Energy was fully aware of the risks in backing Solyndra Inc., a start-up company that pocketed a half-billion dollar DOE loan but never turned a penny in profit before shutting its doors, concludes a former FBI agent hired to examine the company’s books.

The expert’s report, filed this week in Solyndra’s voluminous bankruptcy case in California, could embolden critics who say the government ignored financial red flags in supporting the solar panel maker with President Obama’s maiden green energy loan in 2009.

The $535 million loan, which bankrolled a vast new manufacturing plant in Fremont, Calif., was part of a broad government mission to kick-start the clean energy movement: Solyndra’s unique solar panels would cover commercial rooftops across the country, aiding the environment and boosting the economy.

Yet the company collapsed under a sea of debt and a business plan that, amid dramatic shifts in the global solar market, caused it to sell far fewer panels at far higher costs than envisioned. From 2009-11, it cost Solyndra $3.92 more per watt to make its panels than to sell them, the bankruptcy report shows.

Solyndra filed for bankruptcy Sept.6, 2011. Two days later, it faced a raid by agents from the FBI and the Energy Department inspector general. With those clouds looming, the company’s board hired R. Todd Neilson — the former federal agent and veteran trustee in bankruptcy cases — as chief restructuring officer.

Solyndra’s board wanted a CRO to not only manage its bankruptcy case, but to explore whether the company committed misdeeds on its road to collapse. “In light of the Federal criminal investigation and ongoing Congressional investigation … the Subcommittee agreed that the CRO would act in an independent capacity in determining if any improprieties had occurred with respect to the Debtors’ finances,” Neilson’s report said.

Wireless broadband company LightSquared’s fast-tracked approval process came to a screeching halt late Tuesday when the Federal Communications Commission decided to “indefinitely suspend” its conditional waiver to operate.

The decision came in the wake of a second government study confirming the concerns raised by congressional Republicans and global positioning system users about the potential for the company’s planned network to interfere with millions of GPS devices.

The FCC described its decision as a setback for competition in the wireless market. It is also a huge blow for Philip Falcone, a major donor to President Barack Obama, and his hedge fund, Harbinger Capital Partners, which owns most of LightSquared. Falcone has invested more than $3 billion in the venture.

Until recently, the administration had shown strong support for the politically connected company.

As the Center for Public Integrity first reported in July, the president was an early investor in LightSquared’s precursor company and is tight with many of its biggest backers. White House visitor logs and emails obtained by the Center showed that the company executives met with administration officials before the FCC fast-tracked LightSquared’s approval in January 2011.

The company also repeatedly mentioned the campaign contributions it had made to Democrats and the president in communications with White House staffers.