Tuesday, the Washington Post reported on documents showing that Jonathan Silver, the former head of the Department of Energy’s $38 billion clean-energy loan guarantee program, directed a staff member not to use personal e-mail addresses in official DOE correspondence in order to prevent personal accounts from becoming eligible for government subpoena — and did so a matter of days before the now-failed, $500-million-loan-recipient solar company Solyndra went bankrupt.
“Don’t ever send an email on doe email with a personal email addresses,” Silver wrote Aug. 21, 2011, from his personal account to a program official’s private Gmail account. “That makes them subpoenable.” …Silver repeatedly communicated about internal and sensitive loan decisions via his personal e-mail, the newly released records show, and more than a dozen other Energy Department staff members used their personal e-mail to discuss decisions involving taxpayer-funded loans as well. The Washington Post received the e-mails from Republican investigators on the committee. …Silver said Tuesday that he did not mean to avoid congressional scrutiny. “I intended to advise my DOE colleagues to use their official email for official purposes and personal email for personal purposes,” he said in a statement. “It was never my intention to avoid the requirements of the Federal Records Act.”…The White House and Chu have repeatedly asserted that the Energy Department staff made all loan decisions based on merit, without regard to politics or donors. …Silver wrote on June 12, 2011, to David Lane, counsel to White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley, arguing that approving a loan to a solar-generation facility called Project Amp would help Obama politically.
Despite Silver’s protestations, this all looks more than a little bit sketchy. Perhaps instead of worrying over how to avoid making loan-related correspondence subject to Congressional subpoena, maybe they should have been worrying about — oh, I don’t know — not doing things that would make a Congressional subpoena cause for alarm?
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