President Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head, Lisa Jackson, spoke at the Disrupt San Francisco conference on Tuesday, blasting the Trump administration for what she called a lack of “transparency” in her former department.
Jackson, who served during Obama’s first term, was infamously caught using a false name, “Richard Windsor,” and a fake email account “to avoid federal record-keeping and disclosure requirements.”
Jackson, who now works as Apple’s vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives, has joined a large number of Obama administration alumni in cashing in at Silicon Valley jobs for which they lack any technological qualification but in which their political connections are thought to be valuable resources.
She was interviewed onstage at the conference, which brings tech startups together to share ideas and compete for innovation prizes.
In her interview, Jackson said: “The EPA has been run by Democrats, by Republicans, but has never, in its history that is 40+ years old, been run by someone who seems to be determined to do the one thing that could destroy its credibility, which is not making it transparent.” The interviewer did not, apparently, question Jackson’s credibility on the issue of transparency, nor did the accompanying article at the TechCrunch blog mention her email scandal.
Jackson, a.k.a. Windsor, went even further in attacking the transparency of the EPA under President Trump’s administrator, Scott Pruitt: “Every EPA administrator has committed to regulate transparently. We don’t have that commitment anymore. It’s not the EPA, it’s that the leadership has decided to move away from the transparency that assures people that their health and their community come first rather than somebody else’s bottom line.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.