Energy Department officials were warned that their plan to help a failing solar company by restructuring its $535 million federal loan could violate the law and should be cleared with the Justice Department, according to newly obtained e-mails from within the Obama administration. 
 
 The e-mails show that Energy Department officials moved ahead anyway with a new deal that would repay company investors before taxpayers if the company defaulted. The e-mails, which were reviewed by The Washington Post, show for the first time concerns within the administration about the legality of the Energy Department’s extraordinary efforts to help Solyndra, the California solar company that went bankrupt Aug. 31. 
 
 The FBI raided Solyndra last month, shortly after it closed its doors. 
 
 The records provided Friday by a government source also show that an Energy Department stimulus adviser, Steve Spinner, pushed for Solyndra’s loan despite having recused himself because his wife’s law firm did work for the company. Spinner, who left the agency in September 2010, did not respond to requests for comment Friday. 
 
 The documents offer new evidence of wide disagreement between officials at the Energy Department and officials at the Treasury Department and Office of Management and Budget, where questions were raised about the carefulness of the loan vetting process used to select Solyndra and the special help it was given as its finances deteriorated. Energy Department officials continued to make loan payments to the company even after it had defaulted on the terms of its loan. 
 
 The Solyndra controversy has escalated with each new release of documents to a Republican-led House energy subcommittee investigating the matter. President Obama defended the Energy Department in a news conference Thursday, saying its decisions were made by career professionals. Also Thursday, the head of the embattled loan program announced that he would step down, although Energy Department officials said he was not doing so because of the Solyndra matter. 
 
 As Republican committee leaders moved to get more information about warnings from Treasury and the OMB, an Energy spokesman, Damien LaVera, said agency officials had listened to Treasury’s advice to consult the Justice Department on the loan restructuring but felt it was appropriate to move forward. 
 
 “Ultimately, DOE’s determination that the restructuring was legal was made by career lawyers in the loan program based on a careful analysis of the statute,” he said. 
 
 The e-mails show that Mary Miller, an assistant Treasury secretary, wrote to Jeffrey D. Zients, deputy OMB director, expressing concern. She said that the deal could violate federal law because it put investors’ interests ahead of taxpayers’ and that she had advised that it should be reviewed by the Justice Department. 
 
 “To our knowledge that never happened,” Miller wrote in a Aug. 17, 2011, memo to the OMB. 
 
 In February, the restructuring was approved by Energy Secretary Steven Chu. 
 
 Company executives said they needed a quick cash infusion to save the company, and private investors agreed to contribute $75 million if loan repayment terms were modified. 
 
 Solyndra ran out of money anyway and sought bankruptcy court protection, leaving 1,100 employees out of work. The loan refinancing now makes it likely that taxpayers will have to make up most of the loss, the e-mails show. The Treasury Department’s general counsel had concluded that the renegotiated loan violated the law because it allowed private investors to be first in line for repayment in case of a default. 
 
 Those private investors include investment funds linked to George Kaiser, a Tulsa billionaire and Obama fundraiser. Kaiser has said he had no involvement in the loan. 
 
 The correspondence also suggests that, at the most senior levels at the White House and down through its ranks, the Obama administration wanted to use the Solyndra loan to highlight progress under the stimulus act. 
 
 Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has been investigating the loan, issued a statement Friday saying the correspondence showed a “disturbingly close relationship between President Obama’s West Wing inner circle, campaign donors, and wealthy investors.” 
 
 “After 8 months of stonewalling by this Administration, today we finally learn one of the reasons why they fought our investigation every step of the way,” the statement said. 
 
 One participant in the Solyndra effort, according to the e-mails, was Spinner. He pressed for OMB officials to speed up review of the Solyndra loan, writing at one point: “Any word from OMB? I have the OVP [Office of the Vice President] and WH [White House] breathing down my neck on this.” 
 
 Spinner came from Silicon Valley to serve as a senior adviser on the loan program, and his wife was a lawyer with Wilson Sonsini, the law firm representing Solyndra in its application. Despite an ethics agreement under which he said he would recuse himself from Solyndra’s loan application, correspondence shows that Spinner defended the company, worked to get the president or vice president to visit its factory, and pushed for a final decision on approving the company’s loan. 
 
 “How [expletive] hard is this?” Spinner wrote to a career staffer on Aug. 28, 2009, asking for answers about final approval from an OMB official. “What is he waiting for? Will we have it by the end of the day?” 
 
 In an Aug. 19, 2009, e-mail, an aide to then-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel asked Spinner if he could discuss any concerns among the investment community about Solyndra. 
 
 Spinner dismissed the idea that Solyndra had financial problems. 
 
 “I haven’t heard anything negative on my side,” he said. 
 
 A day after a discussion about possible problems at Solyndra, Spinner forwarded to the chief of staff’s aide a list of Solyndra’s main investors and attached a published profile of Kaiser. 
 
 Spinner is now a fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Democratic think tank. 
 
 A senior administration official declined to comment Friday when asked if Spinner violated his recusal agreement. 
 
 LaVera, the Energy Department spokesman, said Spinner “was authorized to oversee and monitor the progress of applications, ensure that the program met its deadlines and milestones, and coordinate possible public announcements,” because his wife gave up payments related to loan project clients. “He was not allowed to make decisions on the terms or conditions of any particular loan guarantee or decide whether or not a particular transaction was approved,” LaVera said. “This arrangement was reviewed and approved by the department’s career ethics officer.” 
 
 The e-mails also added more evidence that venture capitalists had access to senior White House decision makers. 
 
 David Prend, whose firm Rockport Capital was also a Solyndra investor, wrote a March 2009 e-mail to the White House two weeks before Solyndra won conditional commitment on its loan. Prend thanked Greg Nelson, a White House clean-technology aide, for meeting with him. 
 
 “It was great to meet you with [then-White House climate czar] Carol Browner last week,” he wrote. “I look forward to working with you to get the message out and to effect real change in the Energy Industry. I will follow up shortly on 2 of the companies we discussed,” mentioning Solyndra as one. 
 
 Staff writer Steven Mufson contributed to this report. ||||| WASHINGTON — A senior Energy Department official pushed hard for the government’s $535 million loan to the now-bankrupt California solar energy company Solyndra even after he had disclosed that his wife’s law firm represented the company and he had promised to recuse himself from matters related to the loan application, according to e-mails provided to Congressional investigators by the administration. 
 
 The official, Steven J. Spinner, then a senior member of the Energy Department’s loan guarantee oversight office and a 2008 Obama fund-raiser, inquired frequently about the progress of the Solyndra loan, urging the White House budget office to move more quickly on approving it. 
 
 He also communicated directly with Solyndra officials who were anxiously awaiting word from Washington that their loan would be approved. 
 
 “Any word on O.M.B.?” he asked another Energy Department loan officer. “I have the O.V.P. and W.H. breathing down my neck on this,” referring to the office of the vice president and the White House. 
 
 The new e-mails provide further evidence of high-level cheerleading on behalf of Solyndra, a maker of innovative tubular rooftop solar panels that declared bankruptcy last month and laid off 1,100 workers. 
 
 But even as Solyndra was being promoted as a model of new technology, administration officials were raising concerns about its viability, the legality of a later restructuring and whether the government was sufficiently protected should the business fail. 
 
 The company was the first recipient of a federally guaranteed loan for alternative energy projects, but now is being investigated by the Justice Department over whether it provided misleading financial information to federal authorities. Congressional investigators are also looking at whether the Obama administration adequately oversaw the granting of the loan. 
 
 The latest e-mails also show that senior White House and Treasury Department officials voiced concerns at several stages of the ill-fated loan guarantee. At one point, they show that the White House considered making a bigger public event than previously known of the formal approval of the company’s financing package. 
 
 Top officials, including Rahm Emanuel, then the White House chief of staff, weighed whether President Obama would visit the company to formally announce the loan guarantee, which occurred in September 2009. Ultimately, Mr. Obama did not participate in the event. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. did by video teleconference and Energy Secretary Steven Chu attended. Earlier, Carol Browner, the White House coordinator for energy and climate change policy, met with an investor in the company. 
 
 Still, the e-mails reveal that some White House officials were concerned about the company’s health and the haste with which the loan guarantees were moving, while others were eager to hurry it along to make a public relations splash. 
 
 They also show that days before the Obama administration gave conditional approval to the loan guarantee, a major investor behind the deal met with Ms. Browner. The investor, David J. Prend, a co-founder of Rockport Capital, a high-technology venture capital firm, met with Ms. Browner in late February 2009 and brought up Solyndra, whose application was then pending. 
 
 Solyndra’s chief executive at the time, Chris Gronet, then wrote to the White House on March 6 to describe the company’s plans, after being contacted by Mr. Prend and told to follow up with the White House. “We just need to complete the D.O.E. process and raise the equity portion of the project!” Mr. Gronet wrote, referring to the Department of Energy. “The company is ramping up production to meet a very strong demand.” 
 
 Greg Nelson, a midlevel White House staff member, wrote back to Mr. Gronet on March 8, 2009: “It looks like a great product, and the plans for Fab 2 are inspiring,” referring to the manufacturing plant that the federal government would finance. Within days, the Energy Department’s credit committee voted to approve the conditional $535 million loan. It was publicly announced on March 21. 
 
 Energy Department documents indicate that Mr. Spinner was a senior member of the team involved in vetting the loans and was instrumental in the Solyndra package. His wife, Allison B. Spinner, is a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a Palo Alto, Calif., law firm that represents dozens of Silicon Valley technology firms. 
 
 Through her office, Ms. Spinner declined to comment. Mr. Spinner, who has since left the government, did not respond to a message left at his wife’s office. 
 
 An Energy Department spokesman, Damien LaVera, said the initial terms of the Solyndra loan guarantee were issued before Mr. Spinner joined the staff. Mr. LaVera added that because Ms. Spinner agreed not to participate in or receive any financial compensation from her law firm for work concerning Solyndra, Mr. Spinner was allowed by government ethics officials to oversee the company’s applications. He did not make decisions on the Solyndra transaction. 
 
 “As agreed, I will recuse myself from any active participation in any of these applications,” Mr. Spinner wrote in September 2009, after sending dozens of e-mails in August to the head of the Energy Department loan program and other energy and Obama administration officials asking about the Solyndra project. 
 
 At that time, officials from the White House budget office were complaining of being rushed to approve a deal about which they had significant concerns. 
 
 Administration officials said Friday that while Mr. Spinner was involved in helping coordinate the final steps necessary to clear up disputes so that the administration could commit the money to Solyndra, it does not mean he violated his agreement not to play a role in formally evaluating the loan application. 
 
 Despite the eagerness of Mr. Spinner and other Energy Department officials to see the loan approved, other administration officials continued to raise flags about the company’s viability and the completeness of the loan application package. 
 
 A Treasury Department official objected to the decision by the Energy Department that allowed company investors to get first in line among creditors, instead of the federal government, for part of their investment. 
 
 “Our legal counsel believes that the statute and the D.O.E. regulations both require that the guaranteed loan should not be subordinate to any loan or other debt obligation,” said an Aug. 17, 2011, e-mail from a Treasury official to Jeffrey D. Zients, a top official at the White House budget office. 
 
 An administration official said Friday that the Energy Department disagreed and believed that it did have the legal authority to give priority to private investors, to secure additional financing. ||||| A company that served as a showcase for the Obama administration’s effort to create jobs in clean technology shut down Wednesday, leaving 1,100 people out of work and taxpayers obligated for $535 million in federal loans. 
 
 Solyndra, a California solar panel maker, had long been an administration favorite. Over the past two years, President Obama and Energy Secretary Steven Chu each had made congratulatory visits to the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters. 
 
 Although Wednesday’s announcement came as a surprise, House Republicans and government auditors had questioned the wisdom of the administration’s loan guarantees to the company, backed by capital from billionaire Democratic fundraiser George Kaiser. In July, a House subcommittee subpoenaed White House documents related to the guarantee, and after Wednesday’s developments, Republican lawmakers vowed to continue investigating. 
 
 Solyndra officials said in a news release that they were suspending operations and planned to seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The move would give the company time to evaluate options, including selling the business or licensing its technology to other companies. 
 
 “This was an unexpected outcome and is most unfortunate,” Solyndra chief executive Brian Harrison said in a statement. “Regulatory and policy uncertainties” made it impossible to raise capital to quickly rescue the operation, he said. 
 
 The White House said that it remained committed to building an economy based on clean technology. 
 
 “While we are disappointed by this particular outcome, we continue to believe the clean energy jobs race is one that America can, must and will win,” it said in a statement. “The Department of Energy’s overall portfolio of investments — which includes dozens of other companies — continues to perform well and is on pace to create thousands of jobs.” 
 
 Wednesday’s announcement came amid a broader shakeout in the solar industry. Energy Department officials said that less expensive solar panels made by government-subsidized companies in China undercut Solyndra’s products. 
 
 “We have always recognized that not every one of the innovative companies supported by our loans and loan guarantees would succeed,” Energy Department spokesman Dan Leistikow said in a statement. “But we can’t stop investing in game-changing technologies that are key to America’s leadership in the global economy.” 
 
 The Treasury Department provided Solyndra’s loan, on the assurance of the Energy Department. The terms were reviewed in advance by the White House Office of Management and Budget, and almost all of the $535 million has been disbursed to Solyndra. 
 
 Taxpayers might be on the hook for most of the loan if Solyndra is unable to repay, said experts in the stimulus and loan guarantee program. The Energy Department could seek repayment in court, but receiving more than a nominal amount is unlikely because of the company’s depleted cash and assets. 
 
 “Congress recognized the risks inherent in such an effort and wisely set aside funding to offset any potential defaults or losses,” Leistikow’s statement said. 
 
 Some of the biggest investors in Solyndra, which made easy-to-install solar panels for industrial applications, were venture capital funds associated with Kaiser, a key Obama fundraiser. The company, its connections to the administration and the imperiled federal loan guarantee were detailed in a Washington Post report in June. 
 
 On July 13, the Republican subcommittee majority voted to subpoena White House documents related to the loan guarantee, as it probed how Solyndra received the administration’s first loan guarantee under the federal stimulus plan. Material sought by the committee included e-mails and other documents that the lawmakers said officials at the Office of Management and Budget had failed to produce voluntarily. 
 
 On Wednesday, Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee issued a statement saying that Solyndra executives and administration officials had repeatedly assured staff investigators that the company was financially sound. They called Solyndra’s closing the latest indication that Obama’s stimulus policy had failed. 
 
 “We smelled a rat from the onset,” Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), chairman of the committee, said Wednesday in a joint statement with Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), chairman of the committee’s investigations subcommittee. 
 
 “For an administration that parades around the banner of transparency, they fought us tooth and nail all summer long in turning over relevant documents related to the credit approval, and today we found out why.” 
 
 Administration officials have said the loan guarantee was issued on its merits alone. Democrats said the White House had done its best to comply with congressional investigators, whose requests were what Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) in July called a “fishing expedition.” 
 
 Solyndra had repeatedly been highlighted as a model by the Obama administration. Chu attended the groundbreaking of the factory that Solyndra built using the federal loan, and Vice President Biden’s image was beamed to the ceremony through a video feed. 
 
 In early 2010, independent auditors questioned whether Solyndra could remain a “going concern.” Obama visited Solyndra’s factory in May 2010. 
 
 “The future is here,” Obama said in his appearance, praising plans “to hire a thousand workers.” 
 
 A month after Obama’s visit, the company withdrew plans for a public stock offering. A few weeks later, Government Accountability Office auditors announced that the Energy Department had given favorable treatment to some loan-guarantee applicants. A GAO report said the department bypassed required steps for funding awards to five applicants, including Solyndra. 
 
 Earlier this year, the Energy Department’s inspector general criticized the agency for not maintaining e-mails discussing how loan-guarantee winners were selected. 
 
 GAO auditors, who first uncovered the department’s rush to provide Solyndra a loan without completing required reviews, fear that similar defaults could happen with other loan guarantee projects that weren’t properly vetted. 
 
 In June, Solyndra chief Harrison told The Post that the company’s finances had improved. With cumulative sales of more than $250 million, he said, Solyndra “doubled our production from 2009 to 2010, and we’ll double it again from 2010 to 2011.” 
 
 Costs for solar panels have dropped rapidly as the market matures, so that stronger companies are emerging and less competitive ones are falling by the wayside, said Rhone Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association. 
 
 But solar industry analyst Peter Lynch said that Solyndra struggled from the beginning with an imbalanced financial model. 
 
 “You make something in a factory and it costs $6, you sell it for $3, but you really, really need to sell it for $1.50 to be competitive,” Lynch said of Solyndra. “It was an insane business model. The numbers just don’t work, and they never did.”
– New emails are out in the Solyndra mess, and it's probably not a great day to be a guy named Steve Spinner. He is an Obama-fundraiser-turned-Energy-Department-official who pushed hard for the loan even though he promised to recuse himself—because his wife worked as an attorney for the firm representing Solyndra. The major news services are highlighting his role in making sure the loan happened, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Politico. (He has left his post and now works for a Democratic think tank.) The other main point to emerge: A Treasury official raised a red flag about the loan restructuring that went ignored. Mary Miller advised the Energy Department to get the Justice Department to sign off on the deal because it allowed private investors to be repaid before taxpayers if the company went bust. "To our knowledge, that never happened," Miller wrote. Email snippets from Spinner: “As agreed, I will recuse myself from any active participation in any of these applications.” "Any word from OMB? I have the OVP and WH breathing down my neck on this ...," he wrote to an Energy Department staffer (referring to the Office of Management and Budget, the vice president's office and the White House). "How (expletive) hard is this? What is he waiting for?” Spinner wrote, complaining about an OMB official's apparent reluctance to approve the deal. “Will we have it by end of day? If any risk of not, let me know..."