A Washington attorney suing the Obama administration for access to former EPA chief Lisa Jackson's alias emails revealed Wednesday that Jackson continued to use another email account -- this one registered with the New Jersey government -- while in the Obama administration.
The New Jersey account turned up amid thousands of pages of emails released by the administration late last week. Much of the material in the document dump appears to be innocuous, and involves staffers sharing press clippings.
But Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said the use of alias and non-federal government accounts suggests a widespread attempt to skirt federal records laws and requests.
"This is really epidemic among this administration. They're not that into transparency," Horner said Wednesday.
Jackson, who left at the beginning of President Obama's second term, has already been under scrutiny for using the alias "Richard Windsor" in emails. The documents released last week showed that, in at least one case, Jackson also used her New Jersey government email account to forward her Richard Windsor account an article in July 2009.
This would have been months after she left the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. Horner said the account should have been closed by that point. He suggested it was used to protect certain messages from records requests.
"It was no longer an account which anyone would think to have searched under any open records request because there was no defensible reason it should still be in operation," he told FoxNews.com in an email. "In other words, like the false-identity account, it was a presumed safe harbor. ... The question now is to determine just how, in fact, it was used."
An EPA spokeswoman, asked about the latest complaint, referred FoxNews.com to an earlier statement explaining that EPA administrators for more than a decade have been assigned both "a public account and an internal account."
"The email 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 email account of the administrator to communicate with staff and other government officials," the statement said. "Given the large volume of emails sent to the public account -- more than 1.5 million in fiscal year 2012, for instance -- the internal email account is necessary for effective management and communication between the administrator and agency colleagues."
The statement explained that both accounts are reviewed when responding to records requests.
The EPA did not specifically address whether either of those would have had anything to do with the New Jersey account.
The latest development comes after the EPA confirmed that Region 8 Administrator James Martin plans to resign effective Friday.
An EPA spokeswoman said he was resigning merely "for personal reasons." But Horner and Republican Sen. David Vitter claimed the resignation was tied to questions over the use of a personal email account to conduct "official business."
Vitter and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., claimed documents showed he used his private me.com account to confirm a meeting with the general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund.
The EPA, according to Politico.com, downplayed the communication as a one-time occurrence.
But the Republican lawmakers wrote in a recent letter that "it does not appear that this transaction was an isolated incident."
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