Well, isn’t this special.
Bloomberg is reporting this evening that US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson allegedly used an email alias account for many years to discuss climate change matters while he was CEO of ExxonMobil in what appears to be an effort to keep sensitive communications out of the eyes of the public, Exxon’s shareholders, and, possibly, investigators.
New York says Secretary of State Rex Tillerson used an email alias to discuss climate change while he was chief executive of Exxon Mobil Corp.: Wayne Tracker.
Tillerson sent messages from the account to discuss the risks posed by climate change, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said in a court filing about his office’s fraud investigation of the company. Tillerson, whose middle name is Wayne, used the Wayne Tracker account on the Exxon system from at least 2008 through 2015, Schneiderman said.
Schneiderman made the claim in a letter Monday to Justice Barry Ostrager in New York state court in Manhattan, accusing Exxon of failing to turn over all relevant documents required by a court order. The filing comes in a protracted legal dispute in which Exxon seeks to derail probes by New York and Massachusetts into whether the company misled investors for years about the possible impact of climate change on its business.
The bottom line? According to the charge, Exxon failed to disclose Tillerson’s alias email account as part of an investigation into whether ExxonMobil misled investors about the impacts of climate change, meaning that no documents connected to that account were collected as part of that investigation.
Interesting.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with having a sock puppet account. That is, if you are say, a 15-year-old who wants to maintain a separate Snapchat account to show and talk about things you don’t want your parents to know. But I’d just really like to think that our Secretary of State would be, you know, above such things. Anyway, I will say that it’s no wonder John Barron—I mean, Donald Trump-- selected Tillerson; he fits right in with the rest of the not-so-honest newts and salamanders currently low crawling through the swamp that the White House became on January 20th.