As in a court of law, rules forbid the two from communicating about pending cases. But NLRB emails turned over to the committee under force of subpoena reveal many such ex-parte communications, some of them dealing with the challenge to Boeing's decision to build a non-union assembly plant in South Carolina to augment production of the highly sought-after 787 Dreamliner.
In one email obtained by the committee, the associate general counsel of the NLRB, Barry Kearney, praised a union press release about the Boeing case, stating, "hooray for the red, white, and blue." In another email, reacting to Boeing's intention to fight the complaint, an NLRB attorney wrote "let the games begin." And in another, the NLRB's head of public affairs wrote to the acting general counsel, worried that she "made the Machinists (union) mad."