Armed EPA Agents Visit Asheville Man

Sometimes a small incident says volumes about a large government agency. In this case, it's the Environmental Protection Agency. Around 1:45 PM on May 23, Ashville, North Carolina resident Larry Keller was in the midst of an international call which he had to cut short in order to answer his front door. He found two armed agents of the EPA who were accompanied by an Ashville Police officer. According to a May 24 news story in the Ashville Tribune, a weekly newspaper to which I am a contributing columnist, the agents had blocked his and his neighbor's driveways with their cars. They had driven all the way from Raleigh to confront him. What had he done? The unannounced visit had been occasioned by news that Dr. Al Armendariz, a regional EPA administrator whose 2010 lecture had been videotaped and been released by the office of Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) on April 25th. In the lecture, Dr. Amendariz had said that the agency's "general philosophy" was to "crucify" oil and gas producers. Keller, who describes himself as "a bit of a political activist" had emailed the EPA Director of External Affairs, Dr. David Gray, saying "Hello Mr. Gray. Do you have Mr. Armendariz's contact information so we can say hello?" That was enough to dispatch two armed agents to his front door. He was told by one agent that ".my choice of words in the email could be interpreted in many ways." They did not identify themselves, but asked if he had ever been arrested. He responded swiftly that he had not. When he asked for a copy of his email, they refused to provide it because "the case was still under investigation." The Ashville Tribune by Catherine Hunter quoted Keller who described their attitude as "accusatory" reporting that he compared "their tactics to those of Nazi Germany SS methods." Keller's email inquiry to contact Dr. Armendariz was treated as a threat when it clearly was not. Since when is trying to contact an EPA administrator a crime? "I want the world to know," said Keller, "the government is reaching into the privacy of our homes and computers. I've never been so offended by the power of government in my life." Do we really want an EPA that uses such tactics against a citizen who has merely indicated an interest in contacting one of their administrators to comment on what he had said during a lecture?...more