EPA Honoured Fake Employee Repeatedly And Named 'Him' A 'Scholar Of Ethical Behaviour'

 

'Just when you thought the Federal government couldn't get any more ridiculous...'  

By Eliana Johnson

Windsor’s certificate showing that “he” received training in how to manage e-mail records carries the signature stamp of John Ellis, the agency’s Records Officer, responsible for ensuring it preserves documents that accurately reflect its activities. Attesting to an employee’s training while knowing that the employee did not exist would be a serious infraction. Why Ellis would issue certification in Windsor’s name, if indeed he knew that Jackson and Ellis were the same person, remains a mystery. According to Horner, the alternative — “Tossing attestations that employees completed required training out like Mardi Gras beads” — would not be much better. The EPA did not respond to a request for comment.

 
The correspondence that came from Jackson’s e-mail alias did not indicate that the e-mails came from “Lisa Jackson,” and we don’t know how many people knew that Jackson and Windsor were the same person. Jackson’s use of the alias is the subject of an investigation by the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

Lawmakers have called her use of the Windsor account “baffling” and expressed concern that responses to records requests will be incomplete because officials are incapable of connecting the alias account to the real individual. 

If agency employees were confused by Jackson’s use of the Windsor alias, they were not alone. E-mails released in May by the Committee on Environment and Public Works show that the CEO of an environmental marketing and consulting firm believed he was corresponding with Jackson’s assistant, Richard Windsor, when he received e-mails from the alias account.

On March 4, 2010, Michael Martin, the CEO of Effect Partners, wrote Windsor:

“Hi Richard, Thanks for your help in getting this information to Lisa this last week . . . If you are still there, could you please call me at [redacted]?” 

Jackson, using the Windsor e-mail account, replied: “Michael, Robert Goulding will call you tomorrow.”  

Martin responded: “Thanks Richard!” 

Pointing to the correspondence, ranking committee member David Vitter criticized the agency’s “disregard for transparency” and called the exchange “pretty bizarre.”

Jackson also used the Windsor alias to correspond with Cass Sunstein, the former head of the Obama administration’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. On February 12, 2009, Sunstein wrote Jackson at the Windsor account:

 “Any chance for lunch one of these days?” adding, “(PS I have your special email from my friend Lisa H. — hope that’s ok!).” 

The “special e-mail” to which Sunstein refers is Jackson’s Windsor account. She replied, “Of course it’s OK.”

The EPA has said that the practice of assigning a secondary e-mail account to the administrator of the EPA is common, intended to allow the administrator to manage e-mail traffic, because the primary e-mail address is publicly available. In testimony before Congress, however, the EPA said that the private account was used for “internal” agency communication between Jackson, her top deputies, and other administration officials. Her correspondence with individuals outside the federal government, including Martin, indicates that she used the account more widely.

Jackson defended her use of the Windsor alias in an April speech at Princeton University. She said the name Richard Windsor was a combination of her dog Ricky and a township in New Jersey, and she rejected allegations that she used the account to shield her work from disclosure laws. “I get very angry at the way politics is done,” she said, telling the crowd that she wanted to use an account under the name “admjackson@epa.gov,” but that career EPA employees advised her against it because it was too easily identifiable. “I wish that I had stuck with my original inclination and just left it ‘admjackson,’ although I’m sure somebody would have decided that that was too obscure as well, but you take that and then you assign a motive to it.”

Horner, who has showered the EPA with FOIA requests in an attempt to get to the bottom of the Windsor mystery, does not buy it. He argues that the latest batch of documents suggests the corruption goes beyond Jackson “to the core of the agency” because they illustrate that other agency officials deliberately helped her perpetrate the Windsor “hoax” by “certifying and re-certifying him as sufficiently schooled in ethics and e-mail records management training.” Certainly, the certification that she is trained in the management of e-mail records adds a large dose of irony to the puzzle.

SoRo:  It is illegal to for Federal employees to use private email accounts to conduct ANY kind of official business, including correspondence between people in different agencies or agencies and outside organisations.  Specifically, use of private or 'alias' email accounts violates The Federal Records Act.  Furthermore, President Obama issued a memorandum in November 2011 to improve records management and to 'promote openness and accountability by better documenting agency actions and decisions.'
  

'The EPA is a toxic dump of unethical behavior polluting the biosphere with arugula turds.'

- SparkPlug on June 3, 2013 at 11:11 PM

Yeppers. I can’t remember where I heard or read this in the last couple of days, but allow me to paraphrase:

The EPA has released new rules governing the construction of bird nests/housing/habitats. Wait! I thought that birds built their own housing. Just another reason to pass the Gang of 8′s immigration ‘reform’ plan and expand it to importing undocumented/undeclared American citizen birds because, evidently, only Mexican birds will do the jobs that American birds refuse to do!!! /

lol