By Jim Popkin, NBC News

Years before "Troopergate" and accusations that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin tried to kick her former brother-in-law out of the state police force, she was praising him as "a fine example" of "high-caliber personnel." In a letter dated July 8, 1999, Sarah Palin commended her future brother-in-law, Mike Wooten, for his hard work at Wasilla's July 4th parade.

"SRA Wooten worked hard to locate and deliver appropriate supplies to use in our parade," the then-mayor of Wasilla wrote to Wooten's Air Force commander. "I believe Mike is a fine example of the high-caliber personnel we are blessed to have in the United States Air Force. He was extremely helpful to our community and I thank you for allowing his assistance," Palin wrote.

The unsigned letter is one of hundreds of documents released today to NBC News by the Wasilla city government, dating back to Palin's six-year term as mayor.

The documents also substantiate Palin's sustained use of federal earmarks to fund local projects (she now opposes earmarks on the campaign trail), her personnel moves as mayor and her opposition to environmentalists' efforts to protect Alaska's Steller sea lions. The sea-lion protection plan, Palin wrote to then-Secretary of Commerce Norman Mineta, "will result in adverse conditions being placed on the livelihoods of Alaskans who rely on the fishing industry..."

By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer

When federal judges in San Francisco ruled in 2002 that reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools was unconstitutional because it included the phrase "under God," Sarah Palin was not amused. Palin, who at the time was Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, quickly drafted a terse letter to the editor of a San Francisco newspaper.

“Dear Editor,” Palin wrote in 2002. “San Francisco judges forbidding our Pledge of Allegiance? They will take the phrase ‘under God’ away from me when my cold, dead lips can no longer utter those words,” Palin wrote.

 “God Bless America,” she concluded.

Hundreds of notes and letters
Palin’s letter to the editor is one of hundreds of personal notes and letters written by the former Mayor, and obtained this week to NBC News and others. The documents shed light on the management style--and personality--of the small town mayor turned vice presidential candidate.

By NBC News

A website run by a freelance journalist in California has posted what it calls "highly detailed U.S. government documents proving the whereabouts of now deceased Army microbiologist Bruce E. Ivins on the days the anthrax letters were mailed."

The two-page document is posted on the website for the Enterprise Report, written by journalist Eric Longabardi. Longabardi reports that the documents detail five "precise windows of opportunity that Ivins had to mail the letters, if he was the person who did so in 2001. These never before seen security records detail Ivin's time at the US Army’s USARMIID laboratory in Fort Detrick, Maryland on the days in question relative to the mailings of the anthrax letters."

The documents do not appear to challenge the FBI's assertion that Ivins had time to leave work, drive to Princeton, N.J., and then mail the deadly anthrax letters in a mailbox there.

The two pages of security-access documents reveal Ivin’s whereabouts at the Fort Detrick Army lab on September 17th and 18th and October 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th, 2001, the website said.

By Pete Williams, NBC News Justice Correspondent

Newly released court documents say that Dr. Bruce Ivins, the Army researcher accused of sending the anthrax letters, wrote an e-mail to himself a year ago claiming he knew who mailed the letters.

"Yes! Yes! Yes!!!!" he wrote, sending the e-mail to himself and using the name KingBadger7 at AOL to send it.  "I've pieced it together.  Now we can finally get all of this over and done with....I should have it TOTALLY nailed down within the month.  I should have been a private eye!!!!"  The message does not say who he concluded was responsible.

By Robert Windrem, NBC News Producer

With 8,000 Russian troops still on their territory, Georgian officials are looking for whatever help they can get, including hiring lobbyists from both U.S. political parties to push through needed military and other aid. 
 
A search of records on the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration Act list shows the contracts can be lucrative. The Georgians have paid two U.S. lobbying firms more than a million dollars since 2004.  And the principals of both firms are well-known advisors to presidential campaigns.

One of the lobbying contracts is well known.  Since 2004, Georgia has paid Orion Strategies $800,000 for lobbying. Orion was founded by Sen. John McCain's top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, a former aide to Sen. Trent Lott. For the duration of the campaign, Scheunemann is taking a leave of absence from Orion and made a big deal about halting his work for Georgia earlier this year.

But on April 17, a month and a half after Scheunemann stopped working for Georgia, his partner signed a $200,000 agreement with the Georgian government. Under terms of the contract, Orion gets about $25,000 a month.

By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer

Robert Soloway is a convicted email spammer. By his own admission, he’s sent so many spam, or junk, emails to Americans he lost count long ago. "I would say it's over 10 trillion, most likely, from my home computer that I bought for $1,200 at Office Depot,” Soloway told NBC News in a recent interview at his home in Seattle. “So it's very easy. It really is easy to reach a massive amount of people."

He said he knew he was filling computer in-boxes with unwanted ads and solicitations, and annoying millions of people. But he didn’t really care. "I don’t have time to sit here and listen to you complain about getting emails. 'Delete it!' That was kind of my response,” Soloway said.

For Soloway, spamming was easy and lucrative. “I made it, $20,000 a day. And I spent $20,000 a day,” he boasted.

He was a millionaire by 18, took extravagant trips to Vegas, owned homes in the Northwest and--at his peak--had seven luxury cars filling his driveway.

For photos of Soloway, click here:

By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer

As a vice presidential candidate, Gov. Sarah Palin has railed against federal earmarks, or congressional funding for pork-barrel projects. "In our state, we reformed the abuses of earmarks," Palin recently boasted to a rally in Lancaster, Pa. "We championed earmark reform up there," she said, "to stop Congress from wasting public money on things that didn't serve the public interest."

But musty records culled from the archives of the Wasilla, Alaska, city government reveal that Palin was directly involved in soliciting millions of dollars in earmarks for Wasilla when she was mayor. And she got help from a well-connected Washington lobbyist.

In a monthly status report to the city on March 7, 2000, newly hired "City Lobbyist" Steve Silver describes how the Palin administration had requested $6.6 million in federal earmarks for water and sewer improvements for Wasilla, and another $1 million for police equipment. Mayor Palin reviewed and signed the lobbyist's report, dated April 5, 2000.

By NBC News

The non-profit NEFA Foundation has obtained exclusive footage of what it calls a "would-be terrorist training camp" that operated in a rural section of Canada in 2006. The camp, directed by a confidential informant for Canadaian intelligence officials, included members of the alleged “Toronto 18” terror cell. The "Toronto 18" are accused of conspiring to carry out a large-scale terrorist attack in southern Ontario, including plans for truck bombings and storming local buildings such as the Canadian Parliament and the headquarters of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, NEFA said.

By Robert Windrem, NBC News Producer

Today's attack on the U.S. embassy in Sana'a, Yemen, is the latest in what U.S. officials call a worrisome uptick in terrorist attacks on diplomatic facilities worldwide. There have been four other attacks on embassies belonging to the U.S. or its allies, this year alone.

Adam Gadahn, the American-born al-Qaida spokesman, warned last August that embassies no longer have immunity from attacks by militants.  In the August 2007 video, "The Will of the Matyr Hafiz Usman," Gadahn warned, "The concept of immunity for embassies and consulates provided for by the international infidel law of the United Nations has no place at all in Islamic law." He goes on, ""Law and logic tells us that these criminals and subversive elements have no place among the Muslims."

By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer

There's evidence of possible price gouging at gas stations in Florida, and lawmakers across the South today are on the lookout for other examples of unwarranted price increases in the wake of Hurricane Ike. Some states are even asking consumers to use their cell phones to take pictures of gas-station price signs, to document alleged greed.

In Florida, Attorney General Bill McCollum today is serving subpoenas to four companies, seeking information about reported gas-price gouging. The state has received more than 350 complaints.  "We will not tolerate gouging for greed," McCollum said. Florida is serving the subpoenas to the corporate offices of Flying J, Dodge's Gas Stores, Valero and Pilot Travel Centers.

So far, a Florida official says the highest report of gouging was $5.50 for a gallon of regular unleaded. At another fuel station in Miami, the price Saturday was $4.87 for regular unleaded and $5.09 for premium, the Miami Herald reported. Most South Florida stations are selling gas for under $4 a gallon.

By NBC News

In 2004, the U.S. government compiled a 289-page collection of Osama Bin Laden's earliest interviews and public statements. The texts were translated by the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service. The voluminous report has never been approved for public release. But a copy was obtained by Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, with a link published in Aftergood's Secrecy News blog.

The government report chronicles Bin Laden's growing radicalization. It opens with a March 1994 newspaper interview, in which the al-Qaeda leader denies being a terrorist. The newspaper benignly describes Bin Laden as a "Saudi businessman."

By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer

Well that didn't take long.

Just hours after releasing Sen. Joseph Biden's federal tax returns for the last 10 years, the Obama campaign began pressing Gov. Sarah Palin to follow suit. In an email to reporters titled "Nonpartisan Alaska Elected Official Calls on Gov. Palin to Release Tax Returns," the Obama campaign tried to put Gov. Palin on the defensive.
 
The email quoted Mat-Su Borough (Alaska) Assembly member Michelle Church as saying: “The important question today I guess would be, because Senator Biden released his tax returns, would be for Governor Palin to release her tax returns -- federal tax returns -- to show whether or not she actually paid federal income tax on those reimbursements for when she was living in her Wasilla home.”

By John Rutherford and Jim Popkin, NBC News

Ethel Rosenberg refused to tell a grand jury in 1950 whether she and her husband Julius were Soviet spies, but it didn't make much difference because she was done in anyway by her sister-in-law.

The testimony of Ruth Greenglass, the wife of Ethel's brother David, helped lead to the indictment, conviction and execution of the Rosenbergs for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.

Transcripts of the grand jury testimony of Ethel Rosenberg and Ruth Greenglass were released today by the National Archives, as a result of a lawsuit filed by historians and the nongovernmental National Security Archive in Washington. It's the first time the grand-jury documents have seen the light of day in more than half a century.

According to several historians who reviewed the documents, the most striking new evidence comes from the grand jury testimony of Ruth Greenglass, sister-in-law of Ethel Rosenberg.  In contradiction to Ruth Greenglass’s later trial testimony, her grand jury testimony does not mention Ethel Rosenberg’s typing any of the information being passed to the Soviets about the U.S. atomic program. In fact, the grand jury testimony describes that information being passed in Ruth’s own longhand.

By NBC News

The reports authored by the Department of Interior's Inspector General are not usually, ahem, romance-novel material. Consider the recent barn-burning report that found that an Interior Department agency "circumvented the procurement process by improperly issuing two 15-year cooperative agreements, one for the construction and operation of compression units and one for construction and operation of a crude helium enrichment unit."

So imagine our surprise when the Inspector General released reports today on Capitol Hill alleging that government officials handling billions of dollars in oil royalties engaged in illicit sex with employees of energy companies they were dealing with, and received numerous gifts from them.

By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer

What if the al-Qaida deputy spoke, and nobody listened? That's essentially what happened today when the propaganda division of the terrorist group released its latest video--complete with a major new speech by the al-Qaida deputy, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri--celebrating the anniversary of the 9-11 attacks.

Al-Qaida released the new 90-minute tape to the Al Jazeera television network, played select portions of it throughout the day. But the tape has received scant attention in the United States, especially compared to recent 9-11 anniversaries.

Terrorism analysts say that Americans--and American media outlets--are ignoring al-Qaida messages at their own peril. For many Americans, terrorism concerns are "falling off the radar, as al-Qaida has been silent in the USA (and much of the West) since 9-11," said Michael Sheehan, the former counter-terrorism official for the State Department and the City of New York. "Foreign attacks are mostly background noise. This is troublesome, for if we lose our focus they will attack us again at home," said Sheehan, who is now an NBC News terrorism analyst.

By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer

The FBI today arrested Kevin Ring, a former lobbyist, for his alleged role in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. Justice Department officials said that the FBI arrested Ring this morning at his Maryland home. He is charged in a 10-count public-corruption indictment, the officials said. Ring is a former congressional staffer for Rep. John Doolittle (R-Ca.)

The indictment charges Ring with conspiring with Abramoff and others to corrupt congressional and executive-branch officials by providing things of value to several public officials "to induce or reward those who took official actions benefiting Ring and his clients."

As reported by the Associated Press, Ring is a one-time congressional aide who went on to
work with jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Ring, 37, pleaded not guilty to a 10-count federal
indictment that accuses him of conspiring with Abramoff to win assistance from congressional and executive-branch officials by giving them things of value, and helping them skirt requirements to report those gifts.

He appeared in federal court unshaven, his hair rumpled, wearing shorts and a T-shirt and occasionally fighting back tears as he exchanged glances with his wife.

By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer

Islamic extremists kidnapped American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002, and beheaded him several weeks later. Four men were convicted for the gruesome murder, but U.S. investigators believe many more men were responsible.

Now, some Georgetown University journalism students are working to identify all the conspirators and help bring them to justice. In a collaboration with the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C., the students say they already have identified nearly a dozen men who allegedly helped guard Pearl prior to his murder.

The classroom project is led by Asra Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who was with Pearl in Karachi, Pakistan, just hours before the kidnapping. "Danny always had my back," she said. "And now, with this program, I feel we have his back."

 

By Aram Roston and Amna Nawaz, NBC News producers

The GOP candidate for vice president, Gov. Sarah Palin, may be facing yet another ethics investigation back in her home state of Alaska. An ethics complaint obtained by NBC News was filed Wednesday by the police officers union in Alaska, requesting a probe into possible wrongdoing by the governor or her office. It was brought on behalf of state trooper Mike Wooten, an ex-brother-in-law of Palin who is at the center of the "Troopergate" scandal.

The complaint alleges that the governor or her staff may have have improperly disclosed information from Wooten's personnel records. The complaint alleges "criminal penalties may apply."

John Cyr, director of the union that filed the complaint, told NBC News, "It seems obvious to us somebody has improperly accessed [Wooten's] personnel file."

By Pete Williams, NBC News Justice Correspondent

Federal prosecutors today revealed the arrest of a Michigan man who made at least five Molotov cocktails that he planned to throw at the Republican National Convention. He also discussed plans to bomb underground power cables to shut off power to the convention center, according to the Justice Department.