Inslee uses private email account for official business

Jay Inslee admitted – during press availability Thursday – that he “occasionally” uses his personal email account for official state business. He promised reporters that those emails would be opened to public and archived in state records.

The subject, of course, came up following revelations that potential presidential candidate Hillary Clinton relied exclusively on a personal email account she set up in her home during her time as Secretary of State.

Inslee may have casually brushed off the subject, making a promise of transparency, but that’s not the whole story. As Shift has reported, Inslee has a rather difficult time understanding the importance of open government.

Here are three ways Inslee has been dodging transparency rules.

1. Jay Inslee’s office has deliberately slowed public records requests. Shift has quite a lot of experience with the Inslee administration deploying various tactics to illegally withhold public documents. On the national scale, similar evasion tactics has led to the Associated Press threatening a lawsuit.
2. Whether it is an abrupt stop in an email string or an actual request that someone be removed from an email conversation to avoid public records requests, Shift has uncovered multiple instances of Inslee’s administration using secretive methods to avoid public scrutiny. And, almost all these instances seem to involve conversations surrounding extreme “green” policies.
3. Jay Inslee has a history of outsourcing his extreme green agenda’s policy development to private consultants in order to avoid prying eyes. As Shift reported, Inslee’s outsourced consultants included Jay Manning, a Chief of Staff and Ecology Director under former Gov. Christine Gregoire. Manning sought and received funding from private environmental groups (the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Tom Steyer-funded Energy Foundation) to “assist” in developing Gov. Inslee’s environmental agenda. These same organizations are behind the scandal that brought down disgraced former Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber.