What's Up With That cites Senior Fellow Chris Horner on CEI v. EPA - Complaint RE: Secret Accounts
Jackson, while heading the EPA, was scrutinized in 2012 after reports showed she was using secret email accounts to discuss elements of then-President Obama’s environmental regulations. She resigned shortly thereafter.
One of the aliases Jackson used was the name “Richard Windsor,” according to Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) Senior Fellow Chris Horner, who told The Daily Caller News Foundation in 2012 that the then-EPA chief used the alias “to keep her email from those who ask for it.”
Horner and CEI filed a lawsuit that year seeking 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.” The EPA acknowledged that these emails were known only to a “few EPA staff members, usually only high-level senior staff,” according to the lawsuit.
Many of the officials who were receiving emails from the alias were most likely presidential or political appointees who are required to use official email accounts to conduct government business, the Washington Examiner reported in 2012. Carol Browner, Obama’s former director of White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, began the practice of using alias emails, Horner said.