John Fund @ NRO:
The sudden announcement that Lisa Jackson, the controversial head of the Environmental Protection Agency, will be resigning later this month means that the mysterious Richard Windsor will be leaving the building with her.
His is apparently one of several fake names on official EPA e-mail accounts that Jackson used to conduct business while at EPA. Her office claims the name is a combination of her dog’s name and that of the town of East Windsor, N.J., where she once lived.
It’s not uncommon for government officials to have private e-mail accounts. But federal law has set up several barriers to prevent officials from using non-official or secret e-mail addresses to conduct business and then conceal the contents of those accounts from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Politico reports that the EPA was supposed to ensure that anyone requesting Jackson’s e-mails under FOIA would also have access to communications from “Richard Windsor.” “But the system is far from foolproof,” it dryly notes.
When the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market group, came up empty on its FOIA requests for Jackson’s e-mails relating to her anti-coal efforts, it was told by an EPA whistleblower that she was using “Richard Windsor” and other aliases to coordinate with outside anti-coal groups and engage in other activity she wouldn’t want to come to light.
After CEI filed suit, the Justice Department last month reluctantly agreed to produce 12,000 “Richard Windsor” e-mails. The first batch is set to be released on January 14. CEI employees told me they expect the e-mails will be heavily redacted to obscure their content, but that House committees headed by Representative Darrell Issa of California and Representative Fred Upton of Michigan will launch probes that will ultimately bring all of the e-mails to light.
Indeed, Representative Upton has written to the EPA demanding to know whether the use of alias e-mail accounts “has in any way affected the transparency of the agency’s activities or the quality or completeness of information provided” to Congress. In response, the office of the EPA’s inspector general has announced that it will investigate to see if “EPA follows applicable laws and regulations when using private and alias e-mail accounts to conduct official business.”
It clearly hasn’t always in the past. In 2000, Clinton EPA administrator Carol Browner responded to a Landmark Legal Foundation FOIA lawsuit by claiming that she didn’t use her government computer for e-mail. But Browner then ordered the hard drive on the computer to be reformatted and all backup tapes destroyed, just hours after a federal judge ordered her agency to preserve all agency e-mails. “EPA vowed it would avoid such problems going forward,” says Chris Horner, a CEI fellow and author of the new book The Liberal War on Transparency. “They clearly haven’t, and neither have other government agencies under Obama, who in 2009 promised us ‘the most honest and transparent administration in history.’”
Horner’s book recounts a series of evasive maneuvers that officials across the entire Obama administration have employed.
When cutting deals to ensure the health-care industry’s support of Obamacare and provide $500 million in green-energy loan guarantees to the now-bankrupt Solyndra solar company, senior administration officials used private e-mail accounts that fell outside federal record-keeping laws. The Solyndra loans were coordinated on 14 separate private e-mail accounts. ABC News reported that Jim Messina, who in 2009 was Obama’s deputy White House chief of staff, coordinated with drug companies a $150 million advertising campaign in support of Obamacare using his private AOL account.