Lawmakers and the EPA inspector general wonder if Jackson used a private email account created under an alias to develop those policies in a way that would be invisible to watchdogs and congressional oversight.
“Our objective is to determine whether EPA follows applicable laws and regulations when using private and alias email accounts to conduct official business,” assistant inspector general Melissa Heist wrote to the EPA on December 13, 2012, in announcing that an investigation was under way.
House Energy and Commerce Committee investigators asked a similar question. “We seek to understand whether conducting business with an alias has in any way affected the transparency of the agency’s activities or the quality or completeness of information provided to the Committee,” they wrote on December 13.
Jackson used a private email under the alias “Richard Windsor” to correspond with EPA colleagues, a decision her staff defended by saying that her official email account received too many messages for her to use it efficiently.
“While we understand the need for a secondary account for management and communications purposes, your choice to use a false identity remains baffling,” several lawmakers from the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology replied. “We remain concerned about whether EPA has adequately preserved these records and provided appropriate responses to requests for these records. We also question whether responses to records requests sufficiently connect the alias accounts to the real individual.”
◼ Lisa Jackson’s Destructive Crusade - Henry Payne/National Review
If it seemed like retiring EPA Chief Lisa Jackson carried out her job with a religious zeal, you’d be right.
Barack Obama’s pick as his first EPA administrator told a 2010 National Council of Churches conference in New Orleans that government and religious leaders must unite in their “moral obligation” to heal the planet and “build on the religious and moral reasons for being good stewards of our environment.”
“The question now is, ‘What we can do?’” the green-church devotee concluded, adding that her efforts were blessed by the White House’s Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnership.
Her legion of Washington media disciples — who would have condemned such moral bravado by the Religious Right — ignored her rhetoric. But in punishing those she deems carbon sinners, Lisa Jackson has done enormous harm to American workers....
