The out-of-control corruption of the Obama Administration is utterly beyond parody. You can’t make this stuff up.
But you can make up a phony employee and use him as an alias for your email correspondence. Disgraced EPA administrator Lisa Jackson – now a highly-paid Apple employee with a nebulous job description involving the same environmental regulations she used to enforce – did exactly that. She invented an imaginary EPA employee named “Richard Windsor” to hide some of her email traffic.
And “Richard Windsor” went on to win awards for both his job performance… and outstanding ethical standards.
From the Washington Free Beacon:
The EPA awarded certificates naming Jackson/Windsor a “scholar of ethical behavior.” Jackson, under her secret alias, was also awarded certificates for completing training modules on email records management.
Jackson set up a secret email address under the pseudonym “Richard Windsor.” The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Chris Horner first discovered it in November.
Republicans and government watchdog groups say Jackson may have skirted federal record laws by using the alias, but the EPA claims the secret email address was a common practice—and a necessary one, given the millions of emails that flooded Jackson’s public inbox every year.
Horner, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank, obtained the certificates via a Freedom of Information Act request.
“I like my fake employees to be of the highest ethical standards and fully up to date on the law and ethics of federal recordkeeping,” Horner told theWashington Free Beacon. “At least someone there is.”
The EPA assures us there is a perfectly logical explanation for all this:
EPA official Eric W. Wachter, director of the office of the secretariat, said Jackson was only certified under her alias because that was the account she happened to be signed in as when she took the online tests in a FOIA response letter to Horner.
“As you will recall from many of your previous requests, Administrator Jackson’s secondary email account was windsor.richard@epa.gov, and she completed the EPA-hosted, computer-based training while using that particular account,” Wachter wrote.
Oh, well, that makes it all right, then. She just forgot that she was logged in under the alias she used to dodge federal records laws when she took an online ethics training seminar.
The Washington Examiner has more about the award-winning career of Richard Windsor, imaginary model employee:
Among the certificates awarded to “Richard Windsor” was a Nov. 2, 2009 “Certificate of Completion” for “E-mail Records Management.” Jackson had only been appointed by President Obama as EPA’s top executive a few months prior to the certification.
Official policies “Richard Windsor” likely would have been informed of during the e-mail course was EPA’s bar against using fake email names while conducting official business.
During the ensuing years, however, EPA IT department officials awarded additional certificates to “Richard Windsor,” including three for completion of the agency’s “Scholastica Decentia,” the Certificate for Ethical Behavior, in 2010, 2011 and 2012.
“Richard Windsor” was a top student of ethical behavior in 2010, compiling 100 percent scores for the “Risk” and “Cyber Threats” portions of the course, but a 50 percent score on the “EPA Information” portion dropped Windsor’s total score to 83 percent.
This all reminds me of a classic “M*A*S*H” episode, in which the zany doctors at a Korean War field hospital invented an imaginary soldier whose resume grows until a general decided to give him medal. Richard Windsor is the new “Captain Tuttle.”
Now, if the White House can only find some way to finger Richard Windsor as the driving force behind the IRS scandal…
