It's been over a week since the Michael Bastasch at the Daily Caller exposed EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson's use of alias email accounts to conduct official business. A Monday evening Investor's Business Daily editorial noted that this practice is more than likely illegal, because "Federal law prohibits the government from using private emails for official communications unless they are appropriately stored and can be tracked" -- something which can hardly be done if non-flagged Jackson accounts are under names like "Richard Windsor."
Despite the obvious journalistic hot buttons of government secrecy and stonewalling (the Competitive Enterprise Institute has been trying through freedom of information requests since May and a lawsuit filed a few months later to get the EPA to reveal the contensts of "certain correspondence on the secondary email account assigned to" Ms. Jackson), establishment press coverage has been virtually non-existent.
IBD elaborated Monday night on why this matters (bolds are mine):
During his first full day in the White House, Barack Obama promised he'd brought with him "a new era of open government." Yet again, we have a promise that hasn't been kept.
Among the administration's many violations of public trust to recently become public is the Environmental Protection Agency's apparent attempt to keep some of its correspondence hidden from the light of day through the use of aliases.
... What could possibly be in these emails that the Obama administration wants to keep covered up?
Maybe the correspondence is related to the 7,300 internal emails that CEI sued the Treasury Department last week to produce.
The emails CEI seeks are related to a carbon tax that the Obama administration and congressional Democrats are expected to propose before the end of the year. They seem to want to keep their plans quiet as long as possible so the public won't know what they're up to.
Or maybe the secondary email system was the planning room for the administration's war on coal.
Either way, it's not just the EPA. Chris Horner, the CEI senior fellow who learned about the secret emails while researching his book "The Liberal War on Transparency," calls the Obama White House "one of the most secretive administrations ever."
We agree. This administration has acted more like a ruler over the people than as a constitutional representative of them. The House of Windsor is the ruling family of the United Kingdom, but Richard Windsor wasn't elected to reign over anyone in the United States.
Based on search attempts on Jackson's full name (not in quotes), it appears that the Associated Press and the New York Times don't consider this situation newsworthy. Politico almost seems to be treating it as a joke ("Lisa Jackson's 'Windsor' knot"), and has not revealed EPA's stonewalling of CEI.
Thus, the press is enabling the administration's to act "more like a ruler over the people than as a constitutional representative of them" when it's supposed to be looking into such situations and reporting them when others learn of them. How shameful.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
