Lisa Jackson’s Gadfly

Chris Horner is the gadfly determined to force the Obama administration to live up to its professed commitment to transparency. Having exposed outgoing EPA administrator Lisa Jackson’s use of a secondary government e-mail address under the name of “Richard Windsor,” Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is bent on bringing to light what Jackson sought to conceal through her use of the false identity. On Monday, the administration responded to Horner’s Freedom of Information Act request, and he received 2,100 of some 12,000 e-mails sent from Jackson’s alias account, with the rest set to arrive in installments of approximately 3,000 a month over the next three months.

But, having pored over the items, Horner thinks something’s fishy. “The e-mails they released do not resemble the ‘Windsor’ e-mails we have,” Horner says. That address, according to Horner, was known to and used among high-level EPA officials and Jackson’s political confidants, including the man likely to replace her on the job, Bob Perciasepe, whereas the e-mails the EPA sent to the CEI on Monday appear to have come from an account used for more general purposes, such as sending agency-wide e-mail blasts.