Email scandal: NY AG discovers Rex Tillerson used email alias at Exxon to talk climate
Reuters (via Raw Story) reports:
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former chairman and chief executive of Exxon Mobil Corp, used an alias email address while at the oil company to send and receive information related to climate change and other matters, according to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
The attorney general’s office said in a letter on Monday that it found Tillerson had used an alias email address under the pseudonym “Wayne Tracker” from at least 2008 through 2015.
Wayne is Tillerson’s middle name.
The letter was sent to a New York state judge overseeing Schneiderman’s investigation into whether Exxon misled shareholders and the public about climate change.
In a statement on Monday, Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers said, “The email address, Wayne.Tracker@exxonmobil.com, is part of the company’s email system and was put in place for secure and expedited communications between select senior company officials and the former chairman for a broad range of business-related topics.”
In other words, he used an alias to push climate change denial.
Jeffers said the company had provided 2.5 million pages of documents in response to a subpoena from Schneiderman’s office and would respond to the claims in the letter in court filings.
That seems to be more email than got Trey Gowdy’s panties in a bunch about Hillary.
A State Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the matter.
Bloomberg fills in more of the legal back story:
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. …
New York’s claim marks the latest email-handling matter to make headlines in Washington, from Hillary Clinton using a private email server as Secretary of State to more-recent revelations that Vice President Mike Pence used a private email account to conduct some official business as governor of Indiana. Neither of those instances involved an alias.
