James Delingpole is relishing the prospect of an investigation of DOE e-mails pertaining to CRU:

God bless America and — can I really be saying this? — God bless the legal profession! Despite the best efforts of the Obama administration, most of the world’s other governments (save the plucky Canucks), the United Nations and the Mainstream Media (MSM) to sweep Climategate under the carpet, the lawyers are putting this shoddy scandal where it belongs: in the dock. (Hat tip: Platosays)
The US Department of Energy (DOE) — under pressure, most likely, from Senator Inhofe — has issued a “Litigation Hold Notice” to its various sub-departments asking them to retain any documents pertaining to the Climatic Research Unit at University of East Anglia. . . .
What does it mean? Big, BIG trouble for the Climategate scientists is what it means. You don’t mess with US lawyers and the reason that what might seem an essentially British affair comes under their jurisdiction is because the DOE has provided funding for these scientists.
Here’s one example from the Climategate files:
From: Ben Santer To: [email protected] Subject: Re: averaging Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2008 12:08:14 -0800 Reply-to: [email protected] Cc: Tom Wigley , kevin trenberth
Dear Lisa,
That’s great news! I’ve confirmed with DOE that I can use up to $10,000 of my DOE Fellowship to provide financial support for Tom’s Symposium. I will check with Anjuli Bamzai at DOE to determine whether there are any strings attached to this money. I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to use the DOE money for the Symposium dinner, and to defray some of the travel expenses of international participants who can’t come up with their own travel money. I’ll try to resolve this question in the next few days.
Mmm. I expect you can buy quite a nice no-strings dinner for $10,000.
And here’s another one of the Climategate emails from Dr Phil Jones.
From: Phil Jones To: “Neville Nicholls” Subject: RE: Misc Date: Wed Jul 6 15:07:45 2005 Neville, Mike’s response could do with a little work, but as you say he’s got the tone almost dead on. I hope I don’t get a call from congress ! I’m hoping that no-one there realizes I have a US DoE grant and have had this (with Tom W.) for the last 25 years. I’ll send on one other email received for interest. Cheers Phil
Gosh. I wonder why it can be that he doesn’t want congress to know about his DOE grant. Surely transparency and integrity were ever the CRU’s watchwords?
But if I were the DOE’s lawyers, I think one of the letters I’d most like to examine would be this one by the CRU’s former head Tom Wigley.

More here.