Opinion

Hide & sneak

(
)

So long, Richard Windsor. You didn’t really exist, but you sure made your presence felt.

Richard Windsor was the nom de plume of EPA chief Lisa Jackson, who announced her resignation last month. Why, you may ask, would a federal bureaucrat need an alias? Did she need cover in order to work on her own version of “50 Shades of Grey”? Does a secret identity liberate her to fight General Zod and Lex Luthor?

Or is she, like most users of aliases, trying to hide from the law?

The latter seems closest to the truth. Jackson has not been charged with any wrongdoing, but she has apparently been using unofficial e-mail accounts to discuss government affairs. As a side benefit, such exchanges might have been expected to escape discovery via the Freedom of Information Act. It is against federal law to use private e-mail addresses to discuss the people’s business.

After Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute broke the story, the EPA stated that execs have two e-mail addresses: “The e-mail address for the public account is posted on EPA’s website and is used by hundreds of thousands of Americans to send messages to the administrator. The internal account is an everyday, working e-mail account of the administrator to communicate with staff and other government officials.”

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

Taken by itself, Jackson’s case might not stink like last summer’s mackerel. But last summer, congressional Republicans sent the Department of Energy a letter demanding to know more about agency employees’ frequent use of private Yahoo and Gmail addresses.

When a National Security Agency employee suggested to a reporter that the agency could save a lot of money by using an in-house software program rather than one it was about to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on, the Obama administration slammed him by invoking the Espionage Act. From 1917 to 2008, that act was used in three prosecutions. Obama has used it six times.

In 2011, the Obama administration blacked out 194 pages of e-mails about its . . . Open Government Directive. Team Obama even blacked out an e-mail about how to respond to the AP’s request for information. The government responded to fewer FOIA requests last year even as more of them came pouring in than the year before, the AP said.

In response to a request for information on the cost of travel by top officials, “19 of 20 cabinet-level agencies disobeyed the law requiring the disclosure of public information,” Bloomberg News reported.

To a June 2012 request for the travel records of UN Ambassador Susan Rice, the administration responded three months later that “the estimated completion date is July 2013.” FOIA requests are flat-out rejected about 40% of the time.

A White House spokesman noted that Obama received an award for his commitment to open government. Don’t remember that event, which took place in March 2011? It was closed to the press.

Needless to say, among the least transparent sectors of the Obama government is the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which tracks how changes get into the rulebook and is consequently a black hole. Why would you expect anything but stonewalling from the Information desk?

When the definitive history of the Obama years is penned, it’ll take a comedy writer to do it justice.

You knew this was coming, but here it is anyway: Upon taking office, Obama solemnly declared, “My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government.” And on Jan. 22, 2010, Obama said, “We have put in place the toughest ethics laws and toughest transparency rules of any administration in history. In history! By the way, this is the first administration since the founding of the country where all of you can find out who visits the White House.”

In June of the same year, it emerged that senior lobbyists were meeting with administration poobahs at a Caribou Coffee shop across the street from the White House. Caribou Coffee, unlike 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, does not require lobbyists to sign in and create a permanent record. Who knew government black sites offered tasty macchiato?

But, hey, maybe what we have really is an “unprecedented level” of openness, since “amazingly opaque” would indeed be a new level of transparency. Maybe Obama did create the “toughest” rules, only to ignore them.

As for January Obama’s 2010 statement, it wasn’t exactly inaccurate. It was just an impish invitation to play spot-the-loophole, or to put it more bluntly, pure Bill Clinton-style B.S.