Loretta Lynch used an alias to conduct official Justice Department business

  Judicial Watch is reporting that Loretta Lynch used an alias while conducting official Department of Justice business. The Department of Justice is claiming this was needed in order to  “protect her security and privacy and enable her to conduct Department business efficiently via email” but Judicial Watch has a different take on it.

Illustrating how government hides information from the American public, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch used a fake name to conduct official Department of Justice (DOJ) business in agency emails obtained by Judicial Watch. As the nation’s chief law enforcement officer Lynch, Barack Obama’s second attorney general, skirted public-records laws by using the alias Elizabeth Carlisle in emails she sent from her official DOJ account. In the records provided to Judicial Watch, the DOJ explains it as necessary to “protect her security and privacy and enable her to conduct Department business efficiently via email.”

This begs the question of how many other government officials use fake names and whether those aliases are searched when agencies process Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

  You can see how that works: an entity like Judicial Watch requests documents from someone like Loretta Lynch and they are provided with the documents–eventually–however a search for documents written by Loretta Lynch most likely do not turn up documents written by “Elizabeth Carlisle” and why would they? And it seems to have worked:

In its mission to educate the public about the operations and activities of government, Judicial Watch filed a FOIA request with the DOJ on October 15, 2015 for documents related to SCN. Specifically, Judicial Watch asked for legal opinions and analysis prepared by the DOJ relating to the U.S. involvement in the program, documents that form the foundation for the decision for the country to participate in SCN, all international agreements and related records involving the commitment of U.S. resources or personnel to SCN and records of communication between officials in the Office of the Attorney General relating to the initiative. The DOJ claimed to have no records related to the SCN and billed Judicial Watch a startling $50,000  to conduct the search that didn’t produce a single file.

Though the DOJ recently furnished the documents with Lynch’s fake name, the records were part of Judicial Watch’s original 2015 FOIA request. 

  This brings us back to Judicial Watch’s question of how many other government officials were using aliases to help them skirt open-records laws. There is one other case Judicial Watch knows about:

Besides Lynch, we have only discovered the use of such aliases among government operatives to conduct official business at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Obama’s EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, famously used the alias Richard Windsor in a government email account to conduct official business and communicate with staff. Jackson even took required EPA computer training under the fake identity with the handle Windsor.Richard@epa.gov. She eventually resigned over the scandal, which brought to light the agency’s violations of federal open-records laws.

And I would be willing to bet there are many, many more…

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium