All eight GOP members of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works announced early Thursday morning that they would not attend a scheduled 9:15 a.m. vote on McCarthy.

Lacking a quorum, the committee was unable to proceed on a vote to advance McCarthy’s nomination. The move infuriated Democrats.

“We call on Republicans in the Senate to stop gumming up the works when it comes to the confirmation process,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said of EPA nomination.

“Gina McCarthy is going to become the poster child of their obstructionism,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.). “Gina McCarthy is a woman who deserves this promotion.”

“We invite them back to do their job,” Boxer said shortly before adjourning the meeting. “Maybe some of them slept in this morning, maybe it was a little early for them to get up.”

Republicans say the EPA and McCarthy failed to respond to several requests regarding transparency and her tenure as the EPA’s top air quality official.

“As you know, all Republicans on our EPW committee have asked EPA to honor five very reasonable and basic requests in conjunction with the nomination of Gina McCarthy which focus on openness and transparency,” the Republican senators wrote. “While you have allowed EPA adequate time to fully respond before any markup on the nomination, EPA has stonewalled on four of the five categories.”

“Because of this, no Republican member of the committee will attend today’s markup if it is held,” they continued. “We do not ask or expect that you will agree with this decision. We do ask and expect that you will follow the rules of the committee and the full U.S. Senate.”

Sen. David Vitter (R., La.) submitted more than 600 questions to the nominee.

Republicans and conservative think tanks have accused the agency of stonewalling information requests, skirting public records laws by using private email addresses, and hiding its scientific data from public scrutiny.

“This is not about policy, and Sen. David Vitter and the other Republicans on the committee understand this,” said Christopher Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in a statement. “To hear Democrats claim ‘obstruction’ when Republicans ask simply that EPA come clean before having one of its most secretive officials promoted really takes the cake.”

Horner and CEI have filed numerous Freedom of Information Act lawsuits against the EPA seeking communications from top EPA officials, including McCarthy.

Horner’s research first revealed that former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson used a secret email address during her tenure, a practice that Republicans and watchdog groups said violated the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act.

Subsequent emails released through CEI lawsuits revealed several other EPA officials using private email addresses to conduct government business.

The scope of the EPA’s revision was vast. In a mid-April report on greenhouse emissions, the agency now says that tighter pollution controls instituted by the industry resulted in an average annual decrease of 41.6 million metric tons of methane emissions from 1990 through 2010, or more than 850 million metric tons overall. That’s about a 20 percent reduction from previous estimates. The agency converts the methane emissions into their equivalent in carbon dioxide, following standard scientific practice.

The EPA revisions came even though natural gas production has grown by nearly 40 percent since 1990. The industry has boomed in recent years, thanks to a stunning expansion of drilling in previously untapped areas because of the use of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which injects sand, water and chemicals to break apart rock and free the gas inside. 

The report will likely make it more difficult for fracking opponents to argue the process is extremely damaging to the environment. Experts predict even further reductions in gas leaks in the future.

“The methane ‘leak’ claim just got a lot more difficult for opponents” of natural gas, noted Steve Everley, with Energy In Depth, an industry-funded group.

Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) said it appears Perez used his personal email account almost 1,200 times since 2009 to conduct official department business, including communicating with organizations such as Planned Parenthood, the New York Times, and Talking Points Memo.

Issa wrote that he received a letter from the Justice Department’s principal deputy assistant attorney general for Legislative Affairs, Peter J. Kadzik, conceding Perez had committed at least 34 violations of the Federal Records Act.

“Contrary to Mr. Kadzik’s assertions, this large volume of personal, non-official emails indicates that you did not use your personal, non-official email account in ‘limited circumstances’ to perform your official duties,” Issa wrote. “Instead, it appears that your use of your personal, non-official e-mail account to conduct official department business has been frequent and routine.”

Issa, joined by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R., Va.) and Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), subpoenaed Perez’s personal emails in late March after learning he had used his personal account.

Perez has yet to fully comply with the subpoena, Issa wrote. Oversight officials were only given the opportunity to review 34 emails from Perez’ personal account.

“You have a personal responsibility to comply with the Committee’s subpoena,” Issa wrote in Wednesday’s letter.  “To date, you have not personally complied with the committee’s request or the terms of the subpoena. In addition, you have not personally certified the veracity of the statements made by the department in this matter and you have not certified that the department’s assertion about the volume of responsive communications is accurate and complete.”

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Perez is the latest in a string of Obama administration officials to have been caught using private email for officials business.

EPA Region 8 administrator James Martin resigned in February while under a congressional probe for allegedly using a private email account to circumvent disclosure requirements.

The EPA’s email practices came under investigation after it was revealed that former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson used a secret email address to conduct business.

Jackson and the EPA claimed her secondary address was a common practice among administrators, whose inboxes are flooded with millions of emails per year. However, watchdog groups said it was against the spirit of government transparency and possible violation of the Federal Records Act.

Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow Chris Horner, who first discovered the existence of Jackson’s secret account, said the Perez emails were another example of “the often pedestrian, occasionally elaborate but all unlawful lengths to which this crowd is going to hide what they’re up.”

Horner said abuse of private email and record keeping “is government-wide in its scope and epidemic in proportion.”

The agency is scheduled to finalize the rule, which would require new power plants to emit a maximum of 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour of electricity produced, thereby negatively affecting the coal industry, by April 13.

Yet legal trouble and congressional resistance make it unlikely that EPA will make the deadline.

“If EPA is convinced what it would come out with is legally vulnerable, the delay makes absolute sense,” Frank O’Donnell, the president of Clean Air Watch, told the Free Beacon. “I’d rather they take a little longer and make sure they get it right.”

EPA and White House officials are huddling to consider how they can modify the regulations to survive legal challenges, according to the Washington Post.

“A lot of people, myself included, think this approach is almost certain to get struck down in court,” Jeffrey Holmstead, an energy-industry attorney at Bracewell & Giuliani LLP who headed up the EPA’s air division during the Bush administration, told the Post in a separate story.

Holmstead and others say the EPA does not have the authority under the Clean Air Act to set rules for all new power plants.

“We’re very concerned about the potential for delay,” David Doniger, climate director at Natural Resources Defense Council, said at a recent Capitol Hill forum. If the EPA misses the April deadline, Doniger said, “groups like ours will take steps to have it enforced.”

Environmental groups are pressuring the Obama administration and have rallied supporters to submit more than two million comments on the proposed rules.

But the regulations have run into stiff resistance from the energy industry, Republicans, and also Democrats from coal country.

Opponents say the rules effectively ban construction of new coal-fired power plants by holding them to the same emissions standard as cleaner-burning natural gas plants.

Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (W.V.), Joe Donnelly (Ind.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), and Mary Landrieu (La.) asked the Obama administration in a March 14 letter to reconsider provisions holding new coal-fired plants to the same standards as gas-fired plants.

“Such a requirement is unprecedented under the Clean Air Act and will have the unfortunate effect of preventing the construction of new coal plants or the upgrading of existing sources,” the group wrote in the letter. “We urge you to consider an alternative approach.”

“Not only would this rule have a devastating effect on our coal production, this rule would endanger the reliability and sustainability of our electricity supply,” Manchin added in a statement.

“It’s not a poorly written rule so much as a muddled one that conflates those two too readily,” Competitive Enterprise Institute energy policy analyst William Yeatman said in an interview.

“Instead of taking a subcategory of an industry, it took two disparate industries, combined them together, and then said the best system of emissions control technology for a coal-fired power plant is to be a gas-fired power plant,” Yeatman said.

Environmental advocates argue coal is on the decline in any case.

“Everybody who follows these issues knows the real reason coal use has gone down is because natural gas has become cheaper and so much more abundant,” O’Donnell said. “The EPA rules on the new sources would have no affect on that situation because, as far as I know, there’re no new coal plants in the works anyways.”

But Yeatman and others say it would be folly to over-rely on natural gas.

“There’s this misconception that there’s been this wholesale shift from coal to natural gas,” Yeatman said. “There’s only one region where natural gas has competed with the price of coal, and that’s in the southeast. In the rest of the country coal’s about twice as cheap.”

Natural gas is also subject to volatile price spikes. Overreliance on natural gas can lead to sharp increases in energy prices, such as the one that occurred in New England during a cold snap in late 2012. Energy prices rocketed to four to eight times normal rates.

The New Source Performance Standards could be a bellwether for Obama administration attempts to capitalize on its pledge to reduce carbon emissions. The rules would only affect new plants coming online and not existing power plants, which are one of the main emitters of greenhouse gasses.

Environmental groups such as Clean Air Watch see the standards as a stepping-stone toward regulating existing plants.

Meanwhile, energy advocates see the rules as the administration’s first attempt to hamstring conventional energy plants.

The proposed regulations are “an obvious effort to speed up the exit of coal from the market,” said Benjamin Zycher, an American Enterprise visiting scholar.

“Combined cycle gas plants meet the proposed standards fairly easy,” Zycher said. “But no coal plant yet. That technology would essentially double the cost of coal. This is the opening shot in the EPA’s effort under this admin to put the squeeze on all conventional fuels.”

For now, both sides are holding their breath.

The EPA did not respond to requests for comment.

Emails released in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation between the EPA and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank, reveal former Region 8 administrator James Martin often used his personal email account to communicate with the Environmental Defense Fund.

Martin emailed back and forth often between EDF general counsel Vickie Patton to trade contacts, advice, and news as well as to set up meetings.

Martin resigned in February while under congressional investigation for using his personal email address to conduct official business.

The latest release shows the EPA falsely claimed Martin did not use his private email account for official business, one U.S. senator said Friday.

“EPA should start owning up to the facts piling up before them,” Sen. David Vitter (R., La.) said in a statement. “Their blatant disregard for proper procedure and transparency is now being regularly exposed, and EPA’s leadership must be held accountable.”

Court documents first revealed an email between Martin and the general counsel of the Environmental Defense Fund in January. Martin was a lawyer at the EDF prior to joining the EPA.

Vitter and House Oversight and Government Reform chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) sent a letter in January to Martin after the first private email was revealed.

“We are concerned that your use of the me.com email account may be an attempt to circumvent the Federal Records Act, the Freedom of Information Act, and Congressional oversight,” the lawmakers wrote.

The EPA denied any wrongdoing took place and said the agency “and the regional administrator have gone beyond any legal requirements in our efforts to ensure full transparency.”

“As detailed in public filings, the regional administrator does not use his personal email account to conduct official business,” an EPA spokesperson wrote at the time. “That Mr. Martin responded to one email sent to his personal email account to confirm a meeting that appears on his official government calendar does not alter that fact.”

Martin declared in a January court filing that “although I do not use private email accounts to conduct EPA business, I did, in fact, search my personal email account for communications that contained the search terms outlined in the FOIA request.”

However, Martin frequently communicated with Patton via his personal email account, 14 pages of additional emails produced in ongoing FOIA litigation between the Competitive Enterprise Institute and EPA reveal.

Martin advised Patton on where to hold public forums to discuss the Obama administration’s upcoming new standards for pollution controls in one email.

Patton introduced Martin to Robert Hallman, an adviser to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo whom she described as “Gov. Cuomo’s #1 on energy/envt,” in another email.

Hallman was chairman of the New York League of Conservation Voters prior to joining the Cuomo administration. Incidentally, Patton also used Hallman’s private Gmail account to introduce the two.

One email chain sent from Martin’s personal account was received by EPA’s deputy chief of staff, a fact Vitter said raises expectations that the EPA had knowledge of the email practice.

Martin pleaded with Patton to use his official work email in another instance.

“Vickie—great news. But please, please, please use my work email address for any communications even remotely related to my work,” he wrote in one June 2012 email, one month after CEI first put in a FOIA request for communications between Martin and Patton.

The original search of Martin’s personal account was performed by himself and only included emails stored in his Apple iCloud account. The Competitive Enterprise Institute pressed the agency throughout January in court to fully search Martin’s private email account.

Time stamps on the recently released emails show Martin began forwarding them from his private account to his work account on February 1.

Martin resigned on Feb. 22. An EPA spokeswoman said he resigned for “personal reasons.”

Martin’s actions were at odds with multiple executive branch and agency directives.

“EPA has a clear and consistent policy framework against the use of nongovernmental email systems for official EPA business,” the agency wrote to the Government Accountability Office in 2008.

EPA political appointees were instructed by the Obama administration in 2009 to “not use any outside email account to conduct official agency business.”

The EPA also sent an agency-wide email reminding employees the “EPA prohibits the use of non-EPA email systems when conducting agency business.”

Martin is one of several EPA officials to come under the crosshairs of watchdog groups and congressional oversight for alleged transparency lapses.

Former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, who announced she was resigning in December, used a secret, secondary email account under the name “Richard Windsor” to communicate with other high-level agency officials.

The EPA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Obama chose McCarthy, current assistant administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation at the EPA, to replace former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson.

Jackson resigned amid growing scrutiny over her use of a secret email address to conduct official business, which watchdog groups say is a possible violation of federal record laws.

Some Republicans see the alleged misconduct as a sign of a larger culture of secrecy and opacity at the EPA.

“The EPA is in desperate need of a leader who will stop ignoring congressional information requests, hiding emails and more from the public, and relying on flawed science,” Sen. David Vitter (R., La.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, said in a statement Monday. “McCarthy has been directly involved in much of that, but I hope she can reverse those practices with Lisa Jackson’s departure. I look forward to hearing answers from her on a number of key issues.”

Several GOP-led House committees have also been probing the “Richard Windsor” email flap and other transparency issues at the agency despite not having a say on who will replace Jackson.

House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology chairman Lamar Smith (R., Texas) and Vitter released a letter to McCarthy Monday seeking the science underpinning new air quality rules and criticizing the agency’s lack of openness.

Vitter has several outstanding requests for information regarding the science behind the agency’s regulations, which the EPA has thus far refused to disclose.

Republicans are seeking data sets the EPA used as the basis for its claim of $2 trillion worth of Clean Air Act benefits between 1990 and 2020. The EPA asserts the benefits of those air regulations exceed the costs by a 30-to-1 ratio.

Vitter and Smith wrote in their letter that the EPA’s “troubling reliance on secret data belies the oft-repeated claims that this is the most transparent administration in history and that you will restore scientific integrity in government decision-making.”

“You and other high-ranking administration officials have repeatedly backtracked and reneged on promises to members of Congress to make the scientific info that underpins the agency’s basic associations between air quality and mortality available to the public and independent scientists over the last year and a half,” Smith and Vitter wrote.

Meanwhile, the EPA inspector general continues to investigate Jackson’s “Richard Windsor” account. It is not known when the report will be released, but the results could be damaging if made public in the midst of the confirmation process.

Jackson used an internal EPA email address under the pseudonym Richard Windsor to communicate with other high-level EPA officials and confidants. The EPA says the use of a secret account was standard practice, given the millions of emails that flood the administrator’s public inbox.

Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow Chris Horner first revealed the secret account in his book, The Liberal War on Transparency. The Daily Caller first linked the name “Richard Windsor” to the account in November.

The recent release of thousands of emails from Jackson’s “Richard Windsor” account through a Freedom of Information Act request is now ensnaring other EPA officials.

Acting EPA administrator Bob Perciasepe and Region 9 administrator Jared Blumenfeld both used private email accounts to correspond with Jackson, FOIA documents reveal.

EPA Region 8 administrator James Martin resigned in February while under congressional investigation for using his personal email address to conduct agency business.

While the messages in question were innocuous—nothing more than forwarding news articles—they have fueled controversy over the lack of transparency at the agency.

McCarthy’s nomination is almost all but assured in the Democratic Senate. The Senate has already confirmed her once.

McCarthy is “the right person for the job, and we will move forward with her confirmation hearing as quickly as possible,” Sen. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.) said in a statement.

“The president could not have picked a more qualified person to lead EPA at this critical time,” Boxer said. “The combination of her experience, intelligence, energy, and unquestioned expertise will make Gina an effective EPA administrator. She has a deep understanding that the health and safety of the American people depends on clean air and clean water.”

EPA Region 9 administrator Jared Blumenfeld used his personal Comcast email account to send a news article to former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson’s secret “Richard Windsor” email account.

The email was discovered within a tranche of thousands of emails from Jackson’s alias email account disclosed by the EPA earlier this month in response to a FOIA request by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).

Several congressional committees and watchdog groups say Jackson’s secret “Richard Windsor” account may violate federal records law and runs contrary to the spirit of open government.

“Here we see yet another example of using personal emails for official business,” said Sen. David Vitter (R., La.). “The EPA instructs its employees to ‘not use any outside e-mail account to conduct official Agency business,’ but we keep seeing top EPA officials who must be attempting to dodge the agency’s mandatory recordkeeping policy,”

CEI senior fellow Christopher Horner, who first noted the existence of secret EPA email addresses in his book, The Liberal War on Transparency, said he hopes the disclosures will push the agency to better follow transparency laws.

“Recent past practice is of fighting us at every turn, to the point of legal absurdity and even after activist-employees decide they’re better off quitting to avoid proper searches of private email accounts and computers used in their public service,” Horner said. “We shall see if the agency is getting right with the law thanks to this experience, or still thumbing the bureaucratic/ideological nose at it.”

Horner has filed a FOIA request seeking emails from Blumenfeld’s private account in connection to his official duties at the EPA.

Blumenfeld is the latest EPA official to be ensnared in a widening probe into transparency failures at the agency.

An EPA spokeswoman said the Blumenfeld was simply passing along a news article, not conducting any official business.

“This is a 21 century way of sharing news clips with your colleagues,” the EPA spokeswoman said. “There’s nothing wrong with this.”

EPA Region 8 administrator James Martin resigned last week while under congressional investigation for using his personal email address to conduct agency business.

Bob Perciasepe, the current acting EPA administrator, also used a private account to send emails to other EPA officials.

An EPA spokeswoman said Martin resigned for “personal reasons” and denied he regularly used his private account for government business.

“As detailed in public filings, the regional administrator does not use his personal email account to conduct official business,” the EPA spokeswoman wrote. “That Mr. Martin responded to one email sent to his personal email account to confirm a meeting that appears on his official government calendar does not alter that fact.”

The EPA also said Jackson’s secondary, non-public email address was standard practice—and necessary because of the millions of messages that flood her public inbox.

Blumenfeld, Martin, Perciasepe, and Jackson’s alleged actions are at odds with multiple executive branch and agency directives.

“EPA has a clear and consistent policy framework against the use of nongovernmental email systems for official EPA business,” the agency wrote to the Government Accountability Office in 2008.

EPA political appointees were instructed by the Obama administration in 2009 to “not use any outside email account to conduct official agency business.”

The EPA also sent an agency-wide email reminding employees the “EPA prohibits the use of non-EPA email systems when conducting agency business.”

The Daily Caller first identified Jackson’s secret alias in November.

Politico later reported that “Richard Windsor” is the name of the Jackson family dog.

The EPA inspector general is currently investigating Jackson’s use of the secret email address, as are several congressional committees.

Jackson stepped down as EPA administrator in December.

The EPA redacted roughly 80 percent of the messages, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute. But some gems are still there. Here are the Free Beacon‘s five favorite emails from Richard Windsor.

1. “Coal Ash Regs Are Comin’ To Town”

Santa painting / Wikimedia Commons

One EPA staffer decided to pen an ode to her boss, reworking the lyrics to “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” Which is funny, because Santa Claus gives coal, while the EPA takes it away.

“She’s making a list,

Priority: High,

Gonna find out who’s wet or dry.

Coal ash regs are comin’ to town!

Yes, Lisa Jackson,

Is making all haste,

EPA’s cracking down, On combustion waste.

Coal ash regs are comin’ to town!

She knows which landfill’s leaching,

She knows which pond might break,

She knows they all lack liners,

Close ‘em down, for goodness sake!

One-thirty million tons,

Ev-ery year,

Spew from coal plants, Far and near.

Coal ash regs are comin’ to town!

So, you better watch out,

Coal waste fly,

A high hazard, Either wet or dry.

Coal ash regs are comin’ to town!”

2. Is turducken a real thing?

Turducken / Wikimedia Commons

EPA general counsel Scott Fulton asked Jackson about the existence of turducken—a meat dish in which chicken is stuffed in a duck, which is then stuffed in a turkey.

“Separate and more important question: is there such a thing as a turduckin [sic] (a New Orleans dish)? Was [REDACTED] and they mentioned this. Not sure if they were pulling my leg.”

3. The eight-foot-tall painting

Albert Bierstadt Alaskan Coastal Range at Smithsonian / Wikimedia Commons

EPA facilities, management, and services director Bridget Shea wrote to the EPA deputy chief of staff regarding several paintings the agency was trying to obtain on loan from the Smithsonian.

However, the names of the paintings in question were redacted under FOIA’s privacy exemption.

“The painting entitled [REDACTED], while available, may not be an appropriate fit as it is eight feet tall,” Shea wrote.

4. Kangaroo Court, ‘losers’

Wikimedia Commons

While nearly all of Jackson’s comments were redacted, some of her ire against the GOP was not obscured.

Politico reports that email chains show EPA officials bristling over having to testify before Republican-led committees, who often harshly criticized the agency.

“The GOP should be called out for their kangaroo court,” Jackson wrote.

“He is clearly an unethical bully,” she said of an unidentified person, likely a GOP congressman.

Following several more redacted comments, Jackson writes, “Nancy deserves a medal for putting up with losers like that.”

5. ‘Such a nut’

Peanuts / Wikimedia Commons

Many of the disclosed emails focus on press coverage of the EPA and the agency’s attempts to spin or push back against articles. EPA officials didn’t hide their disdain for some reporters.

Former EPA press secretary Adora Andy said Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel is “such a nut.”

“Yeah, but it helps in strange and interesting ways,” Jackson replied.

Former EPA public affairs official Seth Oster took time to poo-poo the influence of Politico after the publication alerted a potentially damaging White House letter.

“Granted, this is Politico—the ultimate inside-the-beltway trade publication with little outside-the-beltway reach,” Oster wrote.

The emails, released in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), are from Jackson’s pseudonymous, secondary email account under the name “Richard Windsor.”

The emails are the second of four batches of roughly 12,000 emails from the “Richard Windsor” account the EPA has been ordered to disclose.

CEI senior fellow Christopher Horner first reported the existence of Jackson’s secret email address in his book, The Liberal War on Transparency.

EPA officials heavily redacted Friday’s release, omitting all but the most mundane communications. Meeting schedules, discussions of media coverage, and nearly all other content were redacted.

The EPA relied mostly on the “deliberative process” FOIA exemption, which allows agencies to redact intra-agency communications. The argument for the rule is that disclosing internal debates could chill officials’ ability to have forthright discussions about policy.

However, critics say the exemption gives agencies wide latitude and potential for abuse.

For example, an aide forwarded an email to Jackson from a corporate headhunter seeking a recommendation for a “Climate Change Practice Leader in the Washington D.C. area” for an unnamed firm.

Jackson’s response was redacted.

Portions of emails were redacted in some instances, yet those same emails were quoted in full later on in the email chain.

“The only saving grace of this debacle is that, on their face, the overwhelming majority of these claims of ‘deliberative process’ appear to have nothing to do with the sort of agency deliberation that qualifies for withholding,” Horner told the Washington Free Beacon.

He said the exemptions “look to be abusive efforts to avoid embarrassing revelations about mystery meetings on Jackson’s schedule, planning spin for, and then characterizing, interviews and media coverage, and so on.”

Attorney General Eric Holder issued new FOIA guidelines for federal agencies in 2009, instructing them to adopt a presumption in favor of disclosing information to the public.

“On its face this offers promiscuous abuses of what Attorney General Eric Holder acknowledged was FOIA’s most-abused provision, which he swore would no longer be so abused,” Horner said. “But, like all of this administration’s ‘transparency’ rhetoric, they were only thinking about Bush administration documents when striking the grand poses. It never occurred to them that transparency could soon involve them.”

The EPA also invoked a privacy exemption to redact information in several bizarre instances.

According the Justice Department, the privacy exemption permits the government to withhold information about individuals when disclosure “would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”

Among the redacted information was an email from EPA General Counsel Scott Fulton to Jackson in which he inquired about the existence of turducken—a meat dish in which chicken is stuffed in a duck, which is then stuffed in a turkey.

“Separate and more important question: is there such a thing as a turduckin [sic] (a New Orleans dish)? Was [REDACTED] and they mentioned this. Not sure if they were pulling my leg.”

EPA Facilities Management & Services Director Bridget Shea, in another email, wrote to the EPA deputy chief of staff regarding several paintings the agency was trying to obtain on loan from the Smithsonian.

However, the names of the paintings in question were redacted under the privacy exemption.

“The painting entitled [REDACTED], while available, may not be an appropriate fit as it is 8 feet tall,” Shea wrote.

EPA officials have previously told the Free Beacon Jackson’s use of a second account was standard practice and a necessary one because of the hundreds of thousands of emails that flood her public inbox. The agency also said Jackson’s secret account was included in FOIA disclosures.

However, government watchdogs contend Jackson’s use of a secret email address is a possible violation of federal record laws.

“Administrator Jackson’s practice of using fictitious email accounts to conduct official EPA business, shielding the contents from public view, conflicts directly with her responsibility to follow federal records law,” said Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) Executive Director Melanie Sloan in a statement. “The fact that others may have engaged in such conduct before her tenure is no justification. ‘Everybody does it’ is an excuse for kindergarteners, not cabinet officials.”

The Daily Caller first identified Jackson’s secret alias in November.

Politico later reported “Richard Windsor” is the name of the Jackson family dog.

The EPA inspector general is currently investigating Jackson’s use of the secret email address, as are several congressional committees.

Jackson stepped down as EPA administrator in December.

The EPA was not available for comment.

The investigation, initiated in July 2012 but announced publicly for the first time on Tuesday, could substantiate allegations that the agency ignored information in its investigation that might have cast doubt on its findings.

According to a letter from the EPA’s inspector general, the investigation will seek to determine whether aggressive legal action taken by EPA’s Region 6 office against Range Resources “conformed to agency guidelines, regulations, and policy.” An IG spokesperson said the results of the investigation will be released “in the next several months.”

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R., Okla.)—the ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee when the investigation was initiated in July—and Sen. David Vitter (R., La.), the current ranking member, requested the investigation.

“Given all that has come to light about EPA’s ‘crucify them’ agenda … Congress deserves a full explanation about this particular case,” Inhofe said at the time.

“Crucify them” referred to comments by then-Region 6 administrator Al Armendariz, who compared his enforcement philosophy against oil and gas companies to Roman crucifixions.

That philosophy was on full display in the agency’s actions against Range Resources, the EPA’s critics say.

“There’s been a blanket of secrecy at the EPA, but I think it’s starting to unravel,” Vitter told the Free Beacon when asked about the investigation.

“The EPA’s agenda to stymie domestic energy production isn’t isolated to Region 6—it’s an epidemic, and I think this investigation may uncover further evidence of their war on traditional energy production,” Vitter said.

A spokesperson for EPA’s Region 6 office declined to comment on the ongoing investigation.

Armendariz issued an emergency order against Range on Dec. 7, 2010, claiming the company had contaminated two natural gas wells with methane released from drilling activities in the Strawn shale formation near Fort Worth, Texas.

However, internal EPA emails show that even the agency’s own experts doubted the science behind the enforcement actions.

Doug Beak, an environmental chemist at the EPA’s Ground Water and Ecosystems Restoration Research division, told another EPA official nine days before the enforcement actions were made public that the “limited data set” used in EPA’s groundwater tests meant that evidence of water contamination due to Range activities was “not conclusive.”

“The only way now to compare” methane in surrounding drinking water before and after Range’s drilling activities (the crucial data point), Beak said, “would be to make assumptions to fill in data gaps and I don’t believe we have enough experience at this site or data to do this at this time.”

John Blevins, Region 6’s enforcement director, said in a court-ordered deposition that EPA was aware that groundwater in the area contained methane prior to Range drilling activities there but chose not to include that information in the official record of administrative proceedings.

“We were aware of those facts,” Blevins said, adding, “We don’t believe they’re germane or relevant to the issue at hand.”

The agency moved forward with its enforcement against Range despite the holes in EPA’s data. Armendariz emailed EPA staff on Dec. 7, 2010, and at least one Texas environmental activist to tell them to “Tivo channel 8,” a local station scheduled to break the news.

“Yee haw! Hats off to the new Sheriff and his deputies!” exclaimed one of the activists in an emailed reply.

“From a regional administrator’s cozy relationship with local activists to the EPA’s refusal to consider any evidence beyond a YouTube video, it’s little wonder that the inspector general is investigating this case,” said a spokesperson for Energy In Depth, an online oil and gas trade group.

“I just hope we get a courtesy email before the conclusions are issued so we know which channel to Tivo,” the spokesperson said.