The Daily Caller | November 12, 2012
By Michael Bastasch

The name Richard Windsor may sound innocuous, but it is allegedly one of the secret “alias” email accounts used by Obama EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.

“That 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 and author of the new book “The Liberal War on on Transparency,” told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an email.

In his book, Horner revealed the existence of “alias” email accounts used by EPA administrators. The first such transparency dodge, he writes, came from Carol Browner, former director of the Obama White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy and Bill Clinton’s EPA administrator.

“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 told TheDC News Foundation. “The one who said it’s all good because she didn’t use her computer for email anyway? That one.”

Horner said two former “fairly senior” EPA officials contacted him while he was researching his book, and gave him the name of one of the email alias names used by EPA Chief Jackson.

“Richard Windsor” was just “[o]ne of the alternate email addresses she used,” according to Horner, meaning there could be more.

In September, Horner and CEI filed a lawsuit against the EPA, asking the U.S. District Court to order them to produce record regarding “‘secondary,’ non-public email accounts for EPA administrators, the existence of which accounts Plaintiff discovered in an Agency document obtained under a previous [Freedom of Information Act] request” which the EPA says were known only to a “few EPA staff members, usually only high-level senior staff.”

“These alias accounts, from their origin and use under Browner to their use by Browner’s successor, are now the subject of a lawsuit I and two colleagues at CEI also filed grounded in information I uncovered while writing The Liberal War on Transparency,” Horner said.

The Washington Examiner reported that many of these officials were most likely presidential or political appointees and that all government employees are required by federal law to use official email accounts to conduct government business.

“If they do use a private account to do official business,” reports the Examiner, “they are required to make that available to their employing department or agency.”

“EPA is strongly committed to transparency and strictly complies with open government laws such as the Freedom of Information Act. We will review this lawsuit closely and respond as appropriate,” the EPA said in a statement to the Examiner.

CEI sent another Freedom of Information Act request to the EPA on Tuesday “to see what [Jackson] was saying about her radical plans in the means selected to avoid public scrutiny, ‘Richard Windsor,’” said Horner.

Horner has also claimed many other top federal officials use private email accounts to conduct government business and avoid scrutiny under FOIA.

“Ms. Jackson is of course the ‘eco-warrior,’ the ‘most progressive EPA chief in history’ — pushing Obama’s backdoor, other ways ‘of skinning the cat’ of cap-and-trade,” Horner concluded.