Lisa Jackson, the former Environmental Protection Agency administrator who was caught using an email account under the pseudonym “Richard Windsor,” sits on the board of the Clinton Foundation, the charity of Hillary Clinton, of HDR22@clintonemail.com fame.
Jackson’s — or “Windsor’s” — position on the board has not been a secret, but it has received little media attention during the Clinton email scandal, which threatens to derail the Democrat’s White House hopes.
Jackson’s biography on the Clinton Foundation’s website shows that she took her position there in 2013. The bio states that Jackson is currently vice president of environmental initiatives as Apple. It details her career at EPA but makes no mention of her shady email habits.
Jackson’s tactics were not exactly the same as Clinton’s. While the former secretary of state exclusively used a personal email account hosted on a server housed in her basement, Jackson used the account windsor.richard@epa.gov as a secondary email address.
Jackson and the EPA defended the use of the Windsor account at the time, saying that it was a necessary step because Jackson’s regular email address was listed on the EPA’s website and received an enormous amount of correspondence. Officials at the agency said that using two email addresses was not an unusual step for senior government officials. But critics countered that most secondary email account are not set up using aliases. The critics charged that using the Windsor account allowed Jackson to skirt congressional inquiries and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
Ironically, Jackson’s email chicanery prompted a Freedom of Information Act request filed with the State Department for information about Clinton’s email accounts. But that request, which was filed in Dec. 2012 by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, was denied by the State Department which falsely claimed that no relevant records existed.
The State Department’s inspector general found that Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, had been made aware of the FOIA request for information on Clinton’s email account. Other Clinton aides and the State Department’s legal office was also informed of the FOIA. The request was still denied, however. (RELATED: State Department Gave ‘Inaccurate’ Response To Records Requests For Hillary’s Emails)
There is some evidence in State Department records that the agency attempted to fit Clinton with a setup that was similar to Jackson’s.
In an Aug. 30, 2011 email obtained last month by The Daily Caller, State’s then-executive secretary Stephen Mull wrote to two Clinton aides and under secretary for management Patrick Kennedy offering to provide Clinton with a second Blackberry fixed with a state.gov email address “which would mask her identity.”
Emails sent on the Blackberry would “also be subject to FOIA requests,” he cautioned.
Clinton’s deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin shot down the idea, telling Mull in an email that the proposal “doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
Clinton never was provided with a second Blackberry. She used one device to send and receive both personal and work-related emails.
[h/t Phil Kerpen]