House Republicans once again have their sights set on the former head of the Department of Energy Loan Programs Office, who left the agency in October in the wake of the Solyndra bankruptcy scandal.

Jonathan Silver, who resigned in what DOE described as a planned transition (even as Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee were clamoring for his firing), is now drawing fire from House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).

Issa today called for Silver, who is now at centrist think tank Third Way, to turn over communications from his personal email account that relate to his work as executive director of the loan program. And Issa wants the emails before his hearing Wednesday that will focus on Abound Solar, which announced last month that it was preparing to shut down less than two years after being approved for a $400 million loan.

In his wide-ranging investigation of the loan program, Issa has been looking beyond the Solyndra solar energy company at the more than two dozen other projects funded under the stimulus-funded Section 1705 program.

Issa and his stimulus oversight subcommittee chairman, Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, have held a series of hearings in which they have charged that several loan recipients received direct political help from the highest levels of the Obama administration. It's a charge that Issa's Energy and Commerce colleagues have yet to be able to make stick when it comes to that panel's Solyndra probe.

One of the companies that Issa is targeting is BrightSource Energy Inc., which is building a concentrated solar project in California with the help of $1.6 billion in DOE loans.

A month before the BrightSource loan was closed last April, CEO John Woolard sent Silver an email asking for his help in reviewing an email that then-BrightSource Chairman John Bryson was preparing to then-White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley.

That's the same Bryson who was confirmed as President Obama's Commerce secretary last October and who stepped down last month for medical reasons.

In a letter to Silver today, Issa and Jordan noted that Silver switched from his official federal account to a personal email account to respond to Woolard's email. In that response, Silver said that his comments were attached and that "I've tried to turn this into a memo that we can all support."

Issa and Jordan informed Silver that his use of a nonofficial email account to conduct government business "raises the prospect that records ... were not captured by official government e-mail archiving systems. ... Furthermore, conducting official business using a non-official account may implicate criminal or civil penalties for the unlawful removal or destruction of Federal records."

Issa and Jordan asked Silver to deliver by Monday all emails to or from his personal account relating to DOE's loan guarantee program between Feb. 1, 2009, and Oct. 31, 2011.

Neither Silver nor a representative for Third Way returned a call for comment by press time.