New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has accused Secretary of State Rex Tillerson of using a secret email alias to discreetly discuss climate change when he was Exxon CEO—emails that Exxon has not disclosed during the investigation into whether they misled shareholders about climate change.
According to Wall Street Journal, Schneiderman’s office filed a subpoena for emails as part of its probe to see what Exxon knew about the effects of climate change and whether it kept that information from the public. Some of the supplied emails were from the address “Wayne.Tracker@exxonmobil.com,” but Schneiderman alleges that Exxon failed to alert him that Wayne Tracker was actually Tillerson, using a pseudonym.
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Tillerson supposedly used the false name from 2008 until 2015 when discussing “risk-management issues related to climate change.” “Wayne” is Tillerson’s middle name. “Tracker,” presumably, is just a cool-ass last name he liked.
“Despite the company’s incidental production of approximately 60 documents bearing the ‘Wayne Tracker’ email address, neither Exxon nor its counsel have ever disclosed that this separate email account was a vehicle for Mr. Tillerson’s relevant communications at Exxon,” Schneiderman’s office wrote in a letter Monday to the state judge overseeing the investigation.
Exxon released a statement following the allegations, denying wrongdoing. “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,” Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers wrote.
