Independent voices from the TWT Communities
Richard Windsor was a model employee at the Environmental Protection Agency. He was so beloved by his colleagues that the agency awarded him the title "scholar of ethical behavior," and bestowed several cybersecurity certifications on him.
A White House spokesman said Tuesday there's nothing secret about the secret email accounts held by administration officials, and defended the practice as sensible time management.
Richard Windsor never existed at the EPA, but the agency awarded the fictional staffer’s email account certificates proving he had mastered all of the agency’s technology training — including declaring him a “scholar of ethical behavior,” according to documents disclosed late last week.
The researcher who exposed former EPA chief Lisa P. Jackson's private email account is now taking aim at her potential successor — and is expanding the inquiry into the world of mobile phone text messages, which are shaping up as the next frontier in open-records legal battles.
The Environmental Protection Agency said Monday that it will retrain all employees on how to comply with open-records laws and acknowledged that it needs to do better at storing instant-message communications, after the agency came under severe fire from members of Congress who say it appears to have broken those laws.
A study has found that more federal court complaints were filed during the first term of the Obama administration to force the government to abide by the Freedom of Information Act than were filed against the administration of President George W. Bush in his second term.
The Environmental Protection Agency this week acknowledged that Administrator Lisa P. Jackson has a second official email that she uses for important communications, but said it's a standard practice and doesn't shield her from open-records requests.
At the start of a three-nation tour of Southeast Asia, President Obama joked Sunday with a Buddhist monk in Thailand that he could use some prayer to help reach a budget deal with Republican lawmakers to avert a fiscal crisis back in the U.S.
A House committee has launched an investigation into whether EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson used an email alias to try to hide correspondence from open-government requests and her agency's own internal watchdog — something that Republican lawmakers said could run afoul of the law.
A former University of Virginia professor who has drawn the ire of climate change skeptics is entering the legal fray over a conservative group's pursuit of his emails and documents related to his work.
"I've proved [in a book] it's epidemic among this administration, and started out of the White House," he said.
"Unless they provide tangible evidence that such accounts are regularly searched and produced, from my experience, it merits a presumption that they aren't," Mr. Horner said.
