EPA chief, Lisa Jackson, resigns as scrutiny mounts over her alias, transgender email account

Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa Jackson, who, recently, has come under scrutiny over her use of an alias email account, announced Thursday that she's stepping down after four years in office.

Christopher Horn reported in November as follows:

The Environmental Protection Agency is the latest Obama bureaucracy exposed for embarrassing efforts to avert transparency. Its administrator, Lisa Jackson, has been using the email alias "Richard Windsor" to conduct agency business, which might allow some policy conversations to avoid scrutiny and circumvent public records laws.

So far, the EPA has offered a two-part defense...: First, everybody does it: "For more than a decade, EPA administrators have been assigned two official, government-issued email accounts: a public account and an internal account." Second, the masses made us do it: the overwhelming volume of mail an administrator would receive from the public meant she needed an account she would actually read and write from."

Incidentally, as others have already noted, Jackson - in her secondary email account - could have simply rearranged her name, or used her initials. But she chose a different route.

“Why would you pick a fictitious name of someone of different gender?" said Anne Weismann, chief counsel of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "To me it smacks of…trying to hide.”

Perhaps Ms. Jackson was merely trying to bolster the President in his efforts to facilitate and engender transgender equality....... Lol.......

Both [of the EPA's] excuses, though slight on detail, prove too much.

Consider what lies behind the anodyne phrase "for more than a decade." While researching my book, I discovered a 2008 EPA memo to the national archivist reporting a records management problem. The agency had discovered "secondary" nonpublic email accounts for EPA administrators instigated earlier, under and with the active participation of Clinton-era EPA administrator Carol Browner.

That is remarkable because in 2000, a federal court ordered Browner to preserve her records -- specifically her email.... Although she later pled ignorance of the order, the next morning Browner instructed EPA information technology staff to erase her hard drive and backup tapes, as a computer contractor later testified.

Her defense for having records destroyed was that she didn't use her computer for email.

You can imagine my surprise, then, to read of her involvement in arranging what is fairly described as a secret email account. The April 11, 2008, memo that I obtained acknowledges that Browner had such an account, and that such accounts were initiated for the first time under her because it would be impractical to correspond with an email account whose address was known to the public.

This, and that she had assisted in creating the account also raised further questions about her explanation for having her computer's history erased...

The same court ordered thousands of hard drives examined in search of Browner's. Once it was found, the FBI conducted a forensic examination leading only to the conclusion that her hard drive had indeed been "reformatted."...

Obama officials have moved government over to private email accounts, private computers and even privately owned and managed servers. All of these acts indicate a desire to hide what the supposedly most transparent administration in history is up to...

Nevertheless, I wish the best of luck to Lisa Jackson. Who knows. Maybe the President will put her on administrative leave and reassign her to a different desk, like he reportedly [allegedly] has done, and reportedly [allegedly] plans to do, with the State Dept. officials who resigned in the wake of a recently issued report that blamed "leadership and management deficiencies" in the State Dept. for the September terrorist attack at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

Administrative leave means that their pay and benefits remain intact.

Perhaps Lisa Jackson will receive the same treatment.

But ultimately Ms. Jackson must find herself a more protected environment to work in....... Heh...... And hopefully, her next job is a reassignment........ Lol.......