Originally published January 5 2013
EPA administrator uses same secret email tactics used by terrorists to elude law enforcement
by J. D. Heyes
(NaturalNews) The Obama administration has been in office now going on four years. Do you know which cabinet-level department is headed up by Richard Winsor?
If you're scratching your head, don't worry - you're not alone. There is no cabinet-level department head named Richard Windsor in the Obama administration.
Sort of.
The Windsor name is actually an alias that has been used by Environmental Protection Agency head Lisa Jackson, and a pair of congressmen want to know why.
More questions than answers
Reps. Cliff Sterns, R-Fla., and Fred Upton, R-Mich., have sent a letter to Jackson demanding to know why she is using a secret email tactic used by terrorists to hide from law enforcement authorities.
"In recent weeks, questions have been raised in Congress and among public interest groups about the use of one or more secondary email accounts and aliases by you and potentially other officials at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)," they wrote. "Given your reported use of at least one alias email account in your conduct of agency business, we write to ask that you describe fully the nature and extent of this practice."
The lawmakers - members of the Energy and Commerce Committee - also included a list of detailed questions. Among them:
-- According to press reports, you have a government issued email account under the alias 'Richard Windsor.' Is this accurate? Does this email account still exist, and do you use it?
-- According to press reports, on November 20, 2012, EPA issued a statement indicating that '[f]or more than a decade, EPA administrators have been assigned two official, government issued email accounts: a public account and an internal account.' How many email accounts have been assigned to you at the agency? What are the email addresses for these accounts?
-- To your knowledge, are there any other heads of Federal agencies that are assigned an 'internal' email address? If yes, which Federal agencies?
"We recognize the utility of a secondary, internal email account for the conduct of agency business," the lawmakers wrote. "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" the Committee, pursuant to House rules.
The lawmakers are trying to find out if Jackson - viewed as one of the most radical EPA administrators in the history of the agency - is hiding something regarding the function and policy direction of her agency, and if so, what?
Richard Windsor "is the name - sorry, one of the alias names - used by Obama's radical EPA chief to keep her email from those who ask for it," Chris Horner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and author of the new book "The Liberal War on Transparency," told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
History of covering up
In his book, Horner revealed the existence of alias email accounts that have been used, past and present, by EPA administrators. The first came from Carol Browner, the onetime director of the Obama White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy and former President Bill Clinton's EPA chief.
"You remember Ms. Browner, the lady who suddenly ordered her computer hard drive reformatted and backup tapes erased, hours after a federal court issued a 'preserve' order ... that her lawyers at the Clinton Justice Department insisted they hadn't yet told her about?" Horner said. "The one who said it's all good because she didn't use her computer for email anyway? That one."
In October, the Washington Examiner reported that CEI's Horner filed suit against the EPA in federal court in Washington, D.C., asking "certain records pertaining to 'secondary,' non-public email accounts for EPA administrators, the existence of which accounts Plaintiff discovered in an Agency document obtained under a previous FOIA request."
The CEI suit charges that the internal EPA memo, referenced in a Government Accountability Office report in 2008, said the secondary accounts were known only to a "few EPA staff members, usually only high-level senior staff."
Federal law requires all government employees to only use official email accounts.
Sources:
http://www.weeklystandard.com
http://energycommerce.house.gov
http://dailycaller.com
http://washingtonexaminer.com
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