The AP has a fascinating piece out on Obama appointees using multiple emails, some secret to conduct business and how the lack of transparency in withholding those emails from FOIA requests lead to the "perceptions that government officials are trying to hide actions or decisions."
The scope of using the secret accounts across government remains a mystery: Most U.S. agencies have failed to turn over lists of political appointees' email addresses, which the AP sought under the Freedom of Information Act more than three months ago. The Labor Department initially asked the AP to pay more than $1 million for its email addresses.
The AP asked for the addresses following last year's disclosures that the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency had used separate email accounts at work. The practice is separate from officials who use personal, non-government email accounts for work, which generally is discouraged - but often happens anyway - due to laws requiring that most federal records be preserved.
The secret email accounts complicate an agency's legal responsibilities to find and turn over emails in response to congressional or internal investigations, civil lawsuits or public records requests because employees assigned to compile such responses would necessarily need to know about the accounts to search them. Secret accounts also drive perceptions that government officials are trying to hide actions or decisions.
Read the entire piece, it ties in with the recent news that EPA administrator Lisa Jackson's alias of "Richard Windsor, actually won awards!
“Richard Windsor” may have only been an alias for former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson, but that didn’t stop him from being awarded numerous certificates for ethics and records management.
The EPA awarded certificates naming Jackson/Windsor a “scholar of ethical behavior.” Jackson, under her secret alias, was also awarded certificates for completing training modules on email records management.
Jackson set up a secret email address under the pseudonym “Richard Windsor.” The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Chris Horner first discovered it in November.
Republicans and government watchdog groups say Jackson may have skirted federal record laws by using the alias, but the EPA claims the secret email address was a common practice—and a necessary one, given the millions of emails that flooded Jackson’s public inbox every year.
Horner, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank, obtained the certificates via a Freedom of Information Act request.
“I like my fake employees to be of the highest ethical standards and fully up to date on the law and ethics of federal recordkeeping,” Horner told the Washington Free Beacon. “At least someone there is.”
EPA official Eric W. Wachter, director of the office of the secretariat, said Jackson was only certified under her alias because that was the account she happened to be signed in as when she took the online tests in a FOIA response letter to Horner.
Unreal.
