Nothing Beats a Good Coverup

I'm sure there were tons of legitimate purposes for issuing this order:

The Environmental Protection Agency is warning its pollution enforcement officials not to talk directly to congressional investigators, reporters and even the agency's own inspector general, according to an internal e-mail provided to The Associated Press.

Rick Perlstein can be a cynical as he wants to be about Richard Nixon and the founding of the EPA, but at the end of the day the upshot of Nixon's EPA-related cynicism was real improvement in the state of American environmental policy. The Bush administration has shown us that there are other ways of doing business.