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New internal White House emails reveal that a scathing critique of Energy Secretary Steven Chu by a former Obama political advisor led to an extensive internal discussion about failures of the president's Energy Department at the highest levels of his administration. The February 25, 2011 email that sparked the deliberations landed on West Wing desks just as the solar energy firm Solyndra was starting to show outward signs of financial trouble. It was sent by Dan Carol, a former Obama campaign staffer and clean energy advocate who was described by Obama's then-Chief of Staff Pete Rouse as someone whose views...

A key investor in the failed solar power company Solyndra, who was also a political donor to Barack Obama, strategized with his top executives about whether and how they should use their contacts inside the White House to help their failing business venture, according to emails surfaced by Congressional investigators Wednesday. "The White House has offered to help in the past and we do have a contact within the White House that we are working with," an adviser to billionaire Oklahoma oilman George Kaiser writes in an October 6, 2010 email. "I think the company is hoping we have some...

Email correspondence and handwritten notes obtained today by Mike Vanderboegh of Sipsey Street Irregulars and this correspondent provide details on information and strategy being shared between top level officials of the Department of Justice and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, including between Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer and then-ATF Acting Director Kenneth Melson. A total of seven documents are presented herein, including: A Feb. 4, 2011 letter from Assistant U.S. Attorney Ronald Weich denying the walking of guns, itself the subject of a Feb. 8 Gun Rights Examiner column. Email correspondence between Breuer and Melson. The assignment of...

Act (FOIA) request by government watchdog group Judicial Watch suggest that the White House had direct involvement in shutting a transparency hearing to the press. “Please don’t have them reach out to any reporters before I clear [with White House] press,” wrote White House Deputy Associate Counsel Blake Roberts to the Office of Information Policy (OIP), about what should have been a fairly noncontroversial training session. The workshop was conducted by the OIP for Department of Justice employees on FOIA compliance procedures. Another email, from DOJ Press Release Deputy Director Gina Talamona to the OIP and the attorney general’s office,...

Big Journalism has learned that the Occupy Washington DC movement is working with well-known media members to craft its demands and messaging while these media members report on the movement. Someone has made the emails from the Occupy D.C. email distro public and searchable. The names in the list are a veritable who’s who in media. Journolist 2.0 includes well known names such as MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan, Rolling Stone’s Matt Tiabbi who both are actively participating; involvement from other listers such as Bill Moyers and Glenn Greenwald plus well-known radicals like Noam Chomsky, remains unclear.

Solyndra Executives Postpone Testimony, As Emails Reveal Deeper Obama Administration Ties To Bad LoanZeke Miller | Sep. 14, 2011, 8:29 AM Executives of Solyndra, the solar company that was celebrated by the Obama administration before filing for bankruptcy earlier this month, postponed their testimony to a congressional committee investigating the $535 million it received through the encouragement of the White House. Internal emails obtained by The Washington Post show that White House officials tried to rush the review of the loan — so that Vice President Joe Biden could announce the award at the groundbreaking of the company's factory in...

I mentioned on Twitter yesterday that I was astonished with the speed and completeness of response to a pair of requests I filed recently under the Texas Public Information Act, which has been a pleasant surprise in covering Texas Gov. Rick Perry. The tweet drew a quick response from several reporters and activists in Texas, who noted that the speed may have something to do with what Perry's government destroys: every email more than a week old. The office says they print out and save emails that they're required to preserve, but there's no way to check.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A federal magistrate refused Wednesday to order the White House to provide BP PLC with emails by a former top adviser to President Barack Obama about the administration's response to last summer's massive Gulf oil spill. A lawyer for the oil giant had argued that emails by Carol Browner, Obama's former adviser on energy and climate matters, and three other officials in the Executive Office of the President could shed light on the White House's role in estimating the rate of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico from the company's blown-out well. But U.S. Magistrate...

Back in 2009, the feud between the Fox News Channel and President Barack Obama’s administration had reached its heights. There were public on-air attacks from then-White House Communications Director Anita Dunn on one side and the antics of former Fox News host Glenn Beck, who was able to spearhead an effort that resulted in the resignation of White House “green jobs czar” Van Jones. Later that dust-up led to rumblings from the White House about excluding Fox News from the White House press pool, which the Obama administration promptly backed away from. But in the lead-up, the White House had...

New emails obtained by The Daily Caller contradict claims by the Obama administration that the Treasury Department would avoid “intervening in the day-to-day management” of General Motors post-auto bailout. These messages reveal that Treasury officials were involved in decision-making that led to more than 20,000 non-union workers losing their pensions. (General Motors not eager to be political talking point in 2012) Republican Reps. Dan Burton and Mike Turner say that during the GM bailout, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner decided to cut pensions for salaried non-union employees at Delphi, a GM spinoff, to expedite GM’s emergence from bankruptcy. At a Wednesday...

Anyone not convinced of the abject terror Sarah Palin instills in members of the American media needs only read the brief, L.A. Times reflection on the former Governor’s released emails. A number of media outlets filed Freedom of Information Requests demanding the release of Governor Palin’s emails upon her acceptance of John McCain’s VP offer in 2008. The fact that these self-proclaimed guardians of liberty have yet to exhibit the slightest interest in the murky, personal and political histories of the President or the workings of the Obama White House…well, no doubt there is a very good reason. Imagine the...

What was the final event that sprang upon Anthony Weiner his Epiphany: his days were over as a US House of Representatives E-flasher of unsuspecting American girls? When did the fog of surrealism finally clear from his twisted, addle pated, twisted--did I once already say, “twisted”? True that, ‘twas twice twisted-- brain? ...

John Kass on Sarah Palin: Just a friendly game called 'the Sarah Experiment' John Kass June 17, 2011 Excited reporters rummaged desperately through more than 24,000 emails of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in the hopes of finding her saying something stupid. So frantic were the New York Times and Washington Post that they went so far as to solicit readers to help them dig up the dirt on the conservative Palin. It was what it was — a liberal media witch hunt. About the only thing they forgot to do was shriek, "Burn her! Burn her!" Though I'm a...

Governor Palin claimed today on the Fox Business Network that her e-mails validate her assertion that she opposed and killed the bridge to nowhere. Her e-mails do indeed validate her assertion. Notice that she has never denied that she changed her opinion on the bridge from her 2006 campaign. Here is what the Governor wrote in her e-mails about the Bridge: "We can't afford it , the Feds won’t pay for it, the general populace isn’t placing it as a high priority" "I hope folks know my intention is to continue to NOT support the nonsensical notion that the state...

It would be tempting simply to dismiss the mad rush by the New York Times, the Washington Post and other mainstream media outlets to get their hands on those 24,000-plus emails that Sarah Palin wrote while she was governor of Alaska. Clearly, there was a “gotcha” expectation among journalists poring over the Palin messages. They thought they would find damaging new revelations about the woman who, for good or ill, has become in less than four years one of the most controversial figures in American politics. That nothing of note has yet emerged tells us that something other than sound...

NASA head Charles Bolden issued a weekend statement through the NASA Headquarters of Emergency Operations advising employees and their families to prepare for unforeseen emergency and/or disasters. Some key excerpts from the video statement follow: They've given me a few minutes just to talk to all of you in our NASA family about emergency preparedness. NASA recently participated in a FEMA exercise called Eagle Horizon that was a part of a continuity of operations of government exercise that we do annually, and I became aware of some things that concerned me about family preparedness... ... So, what I'm asking all...

The Twitter feed of the company that put online 24,000 pages of Sarah Palin's emails for msnbc.com was hacked over the weekend, with vandals posting a series of pro-Palin and anti-Obama messages.

Beautiful woman inside and out... Sarah Palin imagined God talking to her in a deeply touching email she wrote two weeks before her fifth child, Trig, was born with Down's Syndrome. The poignant message was sent to family and friends... To the Sisters, Brother, Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, and Friends of Trig Paxson Van Palin (or whatever you end up naming him!): I am blessing you with this surprise baby because I only want the best for you. I've heard your prayers that this baby will be happy and healthy, and I've answered them because I only want the best...

COMMENTARY | The mainstream media is consistently manipulated by Sarah Palin. The same Sarah Palin they criticize for being dimwitted is beating the news media at their own game. The release of more than 24,000 pages of emails by the Alaska governor's office is just the latest incident Palin has orchestrated to once again keep he name in the news without committing to run in 2012. The 24,000 plus pages of emails released to the press Friday were in printed form as reported by Yahoo! News. The release of the emails was an embarrassing feeding frenzy as media outlets loaded...

It was the biggest non-story story in Washington since Al Gore’s global warming tirades. I’m talking about the release of thousands of emails of former Gov. Sarah Palin last Friday in Juneau, Alaska. The release of emails (printed on paper) had reporters forming lines the lengths of which made the O.J. Simpson trial look like a queue at the local Dairy Queen. News outlets such as The Washington Post publicly heralded their “read 'em here first” status. Never mind that no reporter had actually spent any time and bothered to read them. The editors just wanted to get the “full...