Rumor: 'Richard Windsor' Quit EPA Over Keystone Pipeline

Exit of EPA boss a protest

EPA chief Lisa Jackson suddenly resigned last week because she was convinced that President Obama is planning to green-light the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline, The Post has learned.

“She was going to stay on until November or December,” said a Jackson insider. “But this changed it. She will not be the EPA head when Obama supports it [Keystone] getting built.”

While the State Department — not the Environmental Protection Agency — is responsible for the pipeline process because it’s an international project, Jackson is still the president’s top adviser on ecological policy.

As you may recall from a previous post, Lisa Jackson has been under pressure to reveal the contents of a secret e-mail account listed to 'Richard Windsor.' The Justice Department just announced that they would 'honor' a FOIA request for that account, requesting any documents regarding the administrations "war on coal":

After CEI filed suit, the Justice Department last month reluctantly agreed to produce 12,000 “Richard Windsor” e-mails. The first batch is set to be released on January 14. CEI employees told me they expect the e-mails will be heavily redacted to obscure their content, but that House committees headed by Representative Darrell Issa of California and Representative Fred Upton of Michigan will launch probes that will ultimately bring all of the e-mails to light.

Another industry group IER (Institute for Energy Research) has also submitted a FOIA request for all of her documents relating to the Keystone Pipeline:

The Institute for Energy Research (IER) renewed a request to the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for documents related to the administration’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline earlier this year. Recent reports indicate that EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has used at least one alias email account to conduct official government business, and IER believes that the EPA’s non-responsiveness to the organization’s original March 15 request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) may owe, in part, to the administrator’s use of alias accounts that were not covered in the earlier letter.

You might remember yesterday I expressed pessimism as to whether the administration would OK the pipeline after Nebraska approved the pipeline route.  I will be pleasantly surprised to be proved wrong.