Hey, it turns out our new Trump-nominated secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, was a crook in his old job. Hey, it also turns out that one of the top climate-change-denying companies on the planet, the company Rex Tillerson ran, sought to mislead their own investors on the risks of climate change in ways we're still only beginning to uncover, thanks to their long-term efforts to hide them.
Lawyers for Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office said in court documents that Exxon hadn’t disclosed that Rex Tillerson, the former chairman and chief executive, used an alias email address to discuss risk-management issues related to climate change. Mr. Tillerson, now the U.S. secretary of state, used the pseudonym “Wayne Tracker” from at least 2008 to 2015, according to the attorney general.
Got that? So the CEO of Exxon was using a pseudonym to communicate with the rest of his staff on issues like climate change, and didn't disclose that when the New York attorney general came knocking. Exxon's innocent explanation for this is, by the way, steaming garbage.
Tillerson, whose middle name is Wayne, used the Wayne Tracker account on the Exxon system from at least 2008 through 2015, Schneiderman said. [...]
Tillerson used the account for "secure and expedited communications between select senior company officials and the former chairman for a broad range of business-related topics," after his primary account began receiving too many messages, Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers said in an email.
This is either a complete fabrication or evidence that the highest levels of Exxon management are populated by idiots. There are many, many professionals who retain more than one email account due to high traffic on one or a desire to compartmentalize conversations. Under no circumstances is it necessary to invent a second, pseudonymous persona to do so. We are being asked to believe that Rex Tillerson was doing business within his own company as Wayne Tracker, man of mystery because all the other possible company email addresses featuring Rex or Tillerson were used up already. And he used that second account to discuss incendiary business issues like the company's contribution to climate change. And that nobody in the company thought to pipe up with any of this when investigators came calling because golly, the entire company from top to bottom just plain forgot.
Now, it's possible Rex Tillerson is so technology-illiterate that he genuinely thought he had to change his own name in order to receive emails from more than one place. And if that's true, who knows what he's changed his name to now that he's heading the State Department. Perhaps now he's Robert Lostmitten. Perhaps he's Biff Mouthface. We don't know. We may never know. Or perhaps he's still Wayne Tracker, but only for conversations involving climate change or other too-sensitive issues.
But the considerably more likely scenario is that Tillerson made a second company account with a nondescript name to help facilitate internal conversations about particularly sensitive matters, and Exxon then tried to hide those additional conversations from investigators who came calling. That scenario is so much more likely, in fact, that we can probably discard the “no, Rex Tillerson and the entire corporate team surrounding him at Exxon were all bumbling morons who durn forgetted how email worked.” Nobody’s that dumb, not even in Donald Trump’s orbit.
Schneiderman's office doesn't know how many emails Exxon hasn't turned over from that account, but it's likely considerably more than the 60 or so investigators stumbled upon by accident. Investigators are now waiting for Exxon to “find” them and turn them over as they should have.
Subpoenas in the case were first issued in 2015, when Rex Tillerson himself was the ExxonMobil CEO. Tillerson remained in that top position until just weeks ago, when he was confirmed as Trump’s new Secretary of State.