Amid a deluge of negative news, the Obama administration seems bent on convincing the media and public that it really is still open and transparent. On Wednesday afternoon, the White House released more than 100 pages of emails between top administration officials showing that the CIA drafted and then redrafted the talking points used to describe what, exactly, happened during the attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi last September. The House Intelligence Committee requested the talking points to use in interviews with the press.

CNN:

The White House released more than 100 pages of e-mails on Wednesday in a bid to quell critics who say President Barack Obama and his aides played politics with national security following the deadly terror attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.

The e-mails detail the complex back and forth between the CIA, State Department, and the White House in developing unclassified talking points that were used to underpin a controversial and slow-to-evolve explanation of events last September 11.

You can read all the e-mails here.

But of course, the emails aren't enough for guess who?

Rep. Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee which is investigating the matter, told CNN's "Situtation Room" that his staff wants to digest the e-mails. He stressed that they were a selected set of documents as released and the committee is still seeking a range of other information.

I've heard that if you stand facing a mirror after midnight in a dark room and repeat "Benghazi!" three times...Darrell Issa, John Boehner, Dick Cheney and Sean Hannity will appear in your mirror. I advise against trying this at home.

Why isn't Jamie Dimon in jail?

When an independent analysis of JPMorgan Chase exposed “serious flaws” in the company’s home loans, it did what Wall Street does best, hid the evidence. In documents released this week, officials found proof that the company “adjusted” the critical reviews it received by buying and selling a new set of home-loan portfolios, creating a “sanitized” pool of data in the process. The move allowed the financial powerhouse to gloss over serious faults in its loans and sell mortgages that appeared healthy to the consumer. The suit, which includes a “trove of internal emails and employee interviews,” may be an important stepping stone in the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s landmark $200 billion case.

NYT:

In a 2007 e-mail, titled “Banking overrides,” a JPMorgan due diligence manager asks a banker: “How do you want to handle these loans?” At times, they whitewashed the findings, the documents indicate. In 2006, for example, a review of mortgages found that at least 1,154 loans were more than 30 days delinquent. The offering documents sent to investors showed only 25 loans as delinquent.

A person familiar with the bank’s portfolios said JPMorgan had reviewed the loans separately and determined that the number of delinquent loans was far less than the outside analysis had found.

At Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, employees also had the power to sanitize bad assessments. Employees at Bear Stearns were told that they were responsible for “purging all of the older reports” that showed flaws, “leaving only the final reports,” according to the court documents.

Such actions were designed to bolster profit. In a deposition, a Washington Mutual employee said revealing loan defects would undermine the lucrative business, and that the bank would suffer “a couple-point hit in price.”

Ratings agencies also did not necessarily get a complete picture of the investments, according to the court filings. An assessment of the loans in one security revealed that 24 percent of the sample was “materially defective,” the filings show. After exercising override power, a JPMorgan employee sent a report in May 2006 to a ratings agency that showed only 5.3 percent of the mortgages were defective.

Such investments eventually collapsed, spreading losses across the financial system.

New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman said that overall losses from flawed mortgage-backed securities from the years 2005 and 2007 were $22.5 billion.

In a statement shortly after he sued JPMorgan Chase, Schneiderman said the lawsuit was a template “for future actions against issuers of residential mortgage-backed securities that defrauded investors and cost millions of Americans their homes.”

Yet U.S. attorney general Eric Holder still has not filed a single criminal charge against any Big Banker, or sent any of them to jail. It's far past time he got started, and Jamie Dimon is just as good a starting point as any.

It sounds like CEO Jamie Dimon has some explaining to do...

Reuters:

A U.S. judge has ordered JPMorgan Chase to explain why the court should not force the bank to turn over 25 internal emails demanded as part of an investigation into whether it manipulated electricity markets in California and the Midwest.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) filed a petition in federal court in Washington on Monday asking the court to order the bank to show cause as to why it would not comply with a subpoena issued by the commission as part of its investigation into the bank's power trading.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly gave the bank until July 13 to submit an explanation as to why the court should not enforce FERC's subpoenas. JPMorgan has asserted the emails are protected by the attorney-client privilege.

I wonder who is going to play Ken Lay in this remake of the Enron scandal?

The joint Wikileaks, Anonymous release of over 5 million leaked Stratfor emails on Monday confirms what many suspected since the detention of Julian Assange ...that the U.S. would press possible charges of espionage or conspiracy related to the release of hundreds of thousands of leaked state department cables. Stratfor emails reveal the U.S. not only already holds a sealed indictment of Assange, they've been patiently sitting on it for over 12 months.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

UNITED States prosecutors have drawn up secret charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, according to a confidential internal email obtained from a private US intelligence company, Stratfor.

In the email, sent to Stratfor intelligence analysts on January 26 last year, the company's vice-president for intelligence, Fred Burton, responded to a media report concerning US investigations targeting WikiLeaks. He wrote: "We have a sealed indictment on Assange."

Underlining the sensitivity of the information - apparently obtained from a US government source - he wrote "Pls protect" and "Not for Pub[lication]".

Mr Burton is a well-known expert on security and counter-terrorism with close ties to US intelligence and law enforcement agencies. He is a former chief of counterterrorism in the US State Department diplomatic security service.

The Wikileaks founder awaits the British Supreme Court decision on his appeal against extradition to Sweden for questioning regarding claims of sexual assault, although to date, he has not been charged with any crime.

While being held in detention in the UK, Assange has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded a gold medal by the Sydney Peace Foundation for "exceptional courage in pursuit of human rights." He also was the people’s choice for Time’s person of the year, and ninth place in the 2011 Time 100.