White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director John Holdren or somebody on his staff would have been well-advised to heed Sir Walter Scott’s poetic warning: “What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.” As a result, the Competitive Enterprise Institute filed suit in a federal court Monday claiming Holdren violated federal law and regulation by doing something he specifically advised employees not to do. That something was using a private email account to conduct official government business. Holdren used the account he had held in his prior position as director of the Woods Hole Research Center, a prominent environmental advocacy group.

As with so much else on the Freedom of Information and government transparency fronts in recent years, CEI’s suit came about as a result of something the conservative think tank’s lawyers discovered in materials they received from the Environmental Protection Agency in the Richard Windsor case. “Richard Windsor” was the alias used by former EPA Director Lisa Jackson in a secret government email account and her personal email to coordinate official business with the agency’s activist allies in the environmental movement.