“Secretary Chu is a wonderful and brilliant man, but he is not perfect for the other critical DOE mission: deploying existing technologies at scale and creating jobs,” Dan Carol said in a confidential memo to then-White House Chief of Staff Peter Rous in March. “Someone else should do that and lead a new team. Someone who is comfortable meeting with bankers (Chu is not) and who gets deployment from the bottom up, in the messy last mile of political life outside of the lab and university setting,” Carol wrote.

Carol was Content and Issues Director for President Obama in the 2008 presidential campaign and remains close to the chief executive. That’s why Rous circulated Carol’s memo to 18 White House colleagues seeking comment.