Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), a harsh critic of FERC, has called on the Commission to purge its web site of what she claims are pornographic e-mails written by Enron Corp. employees. Federal rules ban employees from even looking at the kind of material that FERC has published on its Internet page, she said.

“It’s just another example that FERC is not reviewing the Enron documents they have in their possession to build a case against Enron,” said Cantwell, who sits on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “Instead, FERC is posting pornographic e-mail from Enron employees describing various lewd acts that are the inspiration for the code names of their schemes to gouge ratepayers.”

Audiotapes and documents released by the senator and the Snohomish County Public Utility District (PUD) on Monday revealed that Enron used an energy market manipulation scheme code named “Donkey Punch” — a “crude pornographic term” — to gouge western ratepayers by load shifting electricity and creating congestion, therefore raising power prices, she said.

The questionable Enron e-mails are not found on FERC’s web site at https://www.ferc.gov, said Commission spokeswoman Tamara Young-Allen. Rather, they are located in a database that was specially created by Aspen Systems, which the agency contracted with as part of its investigation into the activities of Enron and its traders in West Coast energy markets, she noted. A person seeking access to this database would automatically leave the FERC web site, according to Young-Allen.

Cantwell also called on FERC to release any other Enron documents in its possession to state and local governments and utilities to use in their pursuit of relief from Enron. She said several documents that could shed more light on how Enron traders manipulated West Coast energy markets have been redacted from public records.

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