What do Gavin Schmidt, Hillary Clinton, Lois Lerner and Lisa Jackson have in common?
Gavin Schmidt is the current head of NASA GISS and the leading climate change warrior scientist/spokesperson. Hillary Clinton of course is the disgraced former Secretary of State and presidential loser. Lois Lerner is the disgraced former IRS official who illegally targeted conservative groups for audits. Lisa Jackson is the disgraced former EPA Administrator who seemed to take direction from climate change warrior lobbyists.
Still don't know what they have in common? Maybe this will help. What don't they have in common?
Answer: Gavin Schmidt is the only one of these government officials who got away with using private email to avoid oversight.
The Federal Records Act was a law enacted in 1950 to cover federal records management. It was made to specifically cover electronic records by the Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014, signed, ironically, by Obama, who was President while all the mentioned were government officials. The Act essentially says that private email cannot be used for government business. Since there are of course .gov email addresses the only reason for government officials to use private email is to avoid oversight, which is what the Act was meant to prevent.
Hillary Clinton's fiasco with private email is well known. It probably cost her the presidential election and she may still face criminal charges. Lois Lerner used private email to conduct IRS business. (One address was for "Toby Miles", Lerner's dog. When some of her emails were sought by the government to prove her illegal activities many had conveniently disappeared in a disk crash and subsequent backup tape erasure.) She had to resign and was almost indicted but was yet another rescue by FBI's Comey. Lisa Jackson used private email to take direction from climate change warrior lobbyists. She resigned as well.
Unlike their secret use of private email, Gavin Schmidt is just blatant about using private email to avoid oversight. Maybe that's why he gets away with it. People think if he says it right on his official government webpage then it must be legal. To this day it says at the bottom of his official NASA GISS webpage:
Twitter: @ClimateOfGavin (note this is not an offical NASA account).
Email: Gavin.A.Schmidt-at-nasa.gov *
*Please note that emails sent to government addresses may be subject to disclosure under FOIA and that you should have no expectation of privacy. If you want to contact me in a non-official capacity, please do so via my columbia email [gs210-at-columbia.edu]. (Replace the -at- with the @ sign).
It has said that since at least July 4, 2014 and probably years before that (I have printouts at intervals since then too).
Schmidt shouldn't be advertising his private email address on an official government webpage in any case. Then only a liar or a fool would say he does so for any other reason than to avoid Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, which is oversight. Schmidt was involved in Climategate and was outspoken about how, despite federal law, taxpayers shouldn't read government climate scientists' email. He, a government official (is he even a US citizen?), was frustrated by having to comply with the legal as-intended use of the FOIA. I would call doing what he did on his government webpage stupid but it worked, so it is probably brilliant.
Full disclosure: I (Dr. Duane Thresher) worked with Gavin Schmidt for 7 years while I was at NASA GISS. He was on my PhD committee. I am co-author on several papers with him. I'd even say we were friends.
Or maybe it wasn't Schmidt's blatancy that allowed him to get away with it but just that climate change warriorism has become the most powerful force in world politics. Climate change warriors, particularly scientists, get a free pass on everything. They are not subject to libel laws, scientific integrity rules, copyright law, etc. For example, everyone in the entire German science hierarchy has been notified of serious corruption in German climate science by German climate scientist Gerrit Lohmann and the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), among others, but none have even responded and it has never been mentioned in the mainstream media even in Germany.
Stefan Rahmstorf is a climate change warrior scientist in Germany, essentially the German Gavin Schmidt. Schmidt and Rahmstorf are both founders of RealClimate. He's at, and abetted by, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). He has, at best, an unimpressive climate background, getting his degrees in oceanography only from the obscure University of Wellington (New Zealand) and University of Wales (Bangor). He was made a fellow of the American Geophysical Union so you have to assume AGU approves of his tactics.
Like Lohmann, Rahmstorf uses Gestapo tactics -- contacting your employer, libeling you -- to silence anyone, including in the media, from questioning climate change or anything he does. The following is just one example.
Markus Lehmkuhl is a German science journalist and works for the German Science Journalists Association. He wrote an article about Stefan Rahmstorf, Ideology and climate change: How to silence journalists, describing how Rahmstorf brutalized a freelance journalist, Irene Meichsner, who dared question climate change even a little.
The article begins:
"A freelance journalist becomes the target of the renowned climate researcher Stefan Rahmstorf, who in the struggle for the supposed truth does not stop short of personal defamation."
Meichsner actually sued Rahmstorf ... and won. Unfortunately, it was a hard fight and the article ends:
"Irene Meichsner – who had to fight her legal battle for her reputation on her own - has had enough of climate issues for the time being. She no longer writes about this subject."
Stefan Rahmstorf has also tried silencing tactics (admittedly much lamer ones), on American journalists who dare question climate change, particularly Bret Stephens, now of the New York Times. I am not sure if Stephens too was ultimately silenced but I haven't heard of any climate change stories from him since (OK, most of the time I can't stomach reading even the headlines from the New York Times).
Full disclosure: Dr. Claudia Kubatzki is coauthor on several papers with Stefan Rahmstorf and was also at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).
This climate change warrior free pass also seems to protect some government officials -- in particular NASA GISS's James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt -- from prosecution for violations of the Hatch Act, which forbids government officials from spending government time and money on political activities.
These climate change warriors, particularly the scientists, are treated like infallible gods, which explains Real Climatologists's motto "If Global Warming Is Irrefutable, It's Not Science, It's Religion". For us it's also about religion because it's a shame to see scientists sell their souls.