http://freebeacon.com/federal-judge-epa ... et-emails/
Everything seems to be so secretive in this "transparent" administration.U. S. District Judge for the District of Columbia Royce Lamberth ordered the EPA to submit to discovery in a case brought against it by the conservative group Landmark Legal Foundation and said the foundation can seek information to determine whether top EPA officials used personal email accounts to conduct official business.
“The possibility that unsearched personal email accounts may have been used for official business raises the possibility that leaders in the EPA may have purposefully attempted to skirt disclosure under the FOIA,” Lambert wrote. “The possibility that the agency purposefully excluded the top leaders of the EPA from the search, at least initially, suggests an unreasonable and bad faith reading of Landmark’s FOIA request and subsequent agreement to narrow its scope.”
Lambert also said the EPA’s statements concerning its search for records were incomplete and “contain numerous inconsistencies and reversals which undermine confidence in their truthfulness.”
GOP lawmakers: Ex-EPA chief may have broken sunshine laws
http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wir ... z2c7E6I2Va
The EPA chief used the alias Richard Windsor in conducting official EPA business over e-mail. Open-records laws require that all government business be conducted on official accounts so they can later be searched in the event of any Freedom of Information Act requests. If private emails are used, there is a procedure for registering them as an official account. Jackson and other EPA employees repeatedly failed to report their private email correspondence. They have also been less than forthcoming in producing requested documents. Now a federal judge has decided that they really weren't transparent at all.The revelation that Jackson asked to communicate with a Siemens official through her personal email account indicated the ex-EPA chief skirted federal sunshine laws, said a letter from House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s top Republican.
“We are concerned that your use of a non-official e-mail account was a deliberate attempt to circumvent federal transparency laws and Congressional oversight. Accordingly, we are writing to request your cooperation as the Committee investigates this matter,” the Thursday letter states.
Vitter and Issa requested all correspondence from Jackson’s personal email account spanning the duration of her EPA tenure that “refer or relate” to official business.
The only thing transparent has been the Obama Administration's efforts to hide every damn thing they do.
Gotta love big government.