Scott Pruitt’s career as a federal public servant ended on the afternoon of July 5, 2018. On that day, three officials from the EPA inspector general’s office were meeting with this author. The meeting itself was off the record. It lasted about an hour. As the three officials were leaving the Yahoo News newsroom, less than a block from the White House, one of the officials looked up at a flat-screen television in the front lobby, which was tuned to CNN.
“Oh my God,” she cried.
Everyone looked up. Though the television was silent, the chyron at the bottom of the screen said that Trump had finally cut Pruitt loose.
Notably, none of the EPA officials seemed especially bothered. They were far too professional to show joy, but their lack of disappointment or surprise would have been difficult to miss. There was little mystery, after all, about what career EPA officials thought of the man who did his best to destroy the agency where they worked.
Two things were surprising about the Pruitt firing. The first was how long it took, and how resistant Trump had been to letting the guillotine fall on the chubby Oklahoman’s neck. Just a month before—when many, though not all, of Pruitt’s ethical shortcomings had been uncovered—Trump praised Pruitt at a Federal Emergency Management Agency meeting where both men were present. “EPA is doing really, really well,” Trump said, in one of his shows of awkward and edgy praise. “Somebody has to say that about you a little bit, you know that, Scott.” Before that, he had called Pruitt the victim of media bias and zeal.
That was thin cover. Trump’s own chief of staff had concluded that Pruitt was an irredeemable pestilence on the Trump administration, one that had to be extirpated as quickly as possible. It took him several months, but in early July 2018, John Kelly succeeded, helped along by tweets from Fox News primetime host Laura Ingraham and the complaints of other conservatives grown exhausted by the damage Pruitt managed to daily inflict on their cause. No number of vanquished Obama regulations was worth quite this much trouble.
The second notable aspect of Pruitt’s demise was just how much harm he did manage to inflict on the nation’s environmental policy, even as it became clear that he was on his way out. On his final day in office, Pruitt removed the cap on the number of glider trucks that could be manufactured in the United States. Because they used antiquated engines, gliders released a far greater number of pollutants than newer, more efficient trucks. There was no reason to grant this exemption, except that the glider lobby wanted it. And as had been the case for decades, Scott Pruitt gladly did what an industry lobby asked of him. He had no reason to deviate from that practice, which had served him remarkably well.
Short and stolid, Pruitt carried himself with a rancher’s confidence. His white hair was closely cropped, and though he wore glasses, there was nothing scholarly or bureaucratic about Edward Scott Pruitt. At forty-eight, he was the second-youngest member of Trump’s original cabinet (Nikki Haley was his junior by four years) and frequently wore a boyish smile that made him look even younger.
Pruitt grew up in Lexington, Kentucky. His father ran restaurants, while his mother stayed home, tending to the three Pruitt children. On the strength of his skill as a baseball player, Pruitt entered the University of Kentucky in 1986. “The Possum,” as he was known, did not distinguish himself as a ballplayer. In 1987, he transferred from Kentucky to Georgetown College, a small Baptist school outside of Lexington. He continued to play baseball, eventually earning a tryout with the Cincinnati Reds. But once it became clear that a career in the major leagues was unlikely, Pruitt turned to law, entering the University of Tulsa’s law school in 1990. He would stay in Oklahoma for the next two-and-a-half decades.
After graduating from law school in 1993, Pruitt started Christian Legal Services, Inc., a law practice that represented clients seeking religious liberty protections under the First Amendment. Among these was a state employee who had supposedly been prevented from holding a Bible study group in her home. Subsequent reporting found that, in fact, Pruitt’s client “had been instructed to avoid proselytizing to agency clients.” The case demonstrated Pruitt’s conviction that Christianity had been pushed out of the public square, a belief that would bring him into alignment with the culture warriors then ascendant in the Republican Party.
Pruitt’s political career began in 1998, when he successfully challenged a sixteen-year incumbent for his seat on the Oklahoma State Senate. Although he’d never run for office, Pruitt announced his arrival in electoral politics with breathtaking confidence: “This race has little to do with Ged Wright,” he said of his opponent as the primary neared. “He simply holds the seat I’m seeking.” Pruitt won.
Pruitt was not interested in the backbencher’s sleepy, comfortable existence. He was elected the Republican whip in 2001 and the assistant Republican floor leader in 2003, giving him increasing prominence within a Republican caucus whose clout was growing in Oklahoma. His religious conservatism earned him the nickname “Pastor Pruitt” from the Tulsa World. He tried to curb the teaching of evolution in public schools and proposed a restrictive new abortion measure. Both measures failed. Aside from those efforts, Pruitt could boast few legislative accomplishments. Accomplishment on behalf of the people of Oklahoma was not what he was after.
In 2007, Pruitt left the State Senate for the RedHawks, a minor league baseball team in Oklahoma City, of which he had purchased a share four years before. When he decided to run for the attorney general’s office three years after that, he did so with a new strategy. Rigidity and recalcitrance became his main selling point. Oklahoma would be as stubborn as Scott Pruitt, who, if he were elected as attorney general, would no longer have forty-seven other state senators to contend with. As the state’s top law enforcement officer, he would have complete control over how to focus the energies of a staff of about 150.
Pruitt was not going to prosecute wrongdoers within Oklahoma, but rather those he saw as threatening the state’s sovereignty. This was in keeping with the rise of the Tea Party movement, which saw in President Obama the first signs of incipient socialism. Pruitt’s job, accordingly, was to be less law enforcement than constitutional defense. “As attorney general,” Pruitt pledged in a 2010 campaign advertisement, “day one, I would file a lawsuit against President Obama to stop the application of healthcare in the state of Oklahoma,” a reference to the Affordable Care Act. In a refrain similar to the one he would strike some seven years later, he vowed to institute an “office of federalism,” whose staff lawyers would “wake up each day, and go to bed each night, thinking about the ways they can push back against Washington.”
For that election, he took a $5,000 contribution from Koch Industries, whose owners, the brothers Koch, were busy funding candidates and causes that would resist Obama’s vision of a more expansive federal government. Other contributors included Bank of America, Chevron, and the National Rifle Association, but it was the Koch contribution that provided the clearest evidence of a marriage between Pruitt’s longstanding conservative convictions and a reinvigorated national movement of anti-government activism couched in the language of individual liberty, free markets and states’ rights.
“It was a perfect timing of his personal philosophy matching up with what the people of Oklahoma wanted,” explained former Pruitt campaign adviser Tyler Laughlin many years later.
One of Pruitt’s first steps as attorney general was to file suit against Kathleen Sebelius, the Health and Human Services chief, in an attempt to stop the federal government from giving tax credits for health insurance. He also shuttered his office’s Environmental Protection Unit and, as promised, opened a new branch of the attorney general’s office, the Federalism Unit, whose mission was to fend off the federal government as if it were a criminal gang creeping across the borders of Oklahoma.
Since 2005, the Oklahoma attorney general’s office had been working on a lawsuit against Arkansas-based poultry producers who, he alleged, had polluted the Illinois River. Pruitt had taken $40,000 from poultry executives during his run for that office. Pruitt halted the lawsuit. In this, and other actions Pruitt took, it was impossible to tell where his own convictions ended and the concerns of donors began. Like the very craftiest politicians, he made the two indistinguishable.
Pruitt also began to shift his attention away from the Affordable Care Act to the EPA, which he sued fourteen times during his nearly two terms in office, often in concert with other attorneys general—but also with the participation of energy companies that had been among his most loyal supporters. In some instances, the New York Times found, Pruitt simply cut-and-pasted language sent him by energy companies into correspondences with the EPA.
In 2012, Pruitt was elected the head of the Republican Attorneys General Association, or RAGA, which coordinated anti-Obama legal actions on a variety of fronts. RAGA’s creed was best summarized by Texas attorney general Greg Abbott, who filed forty-four suits against the Obama administration before becoming that state’s governor: “I go into the office, I sue the federal government and I go home.” RAGA, to which Abbott belonged with twenty-six other attorneys general around the nation, received $353,250 from Koch Industries during the 2016 election cycle.
In early 2013, Pruitt convened a Summit on Federalism and the Future of Fossil Fuels, held in Oklahoma City. The sponsoring institution was the Law and Economics Center at the George Mason University School of Law, which had deep ties to the Koch network. Among the speakers were William F. Whitsitt, a vice president at Devon Energy who had drafted the language Pruitt later sent to the EPA, and Harold G. Hamm, an Oklahoma-based energy executive who was crucial to Pruitt’s political rise (and who later became a close adviser of President Trump). There were also lawyers who worked for firms involved in Pruitt’s lawsuits against the EPA.
“These days, whenever states go to court against the Obama administration, the chances are that Pruitt is somehow involved,” Governing magazine said in a 2015 profile of Pruitt.
Pruitt was not up for reelection in 2016, but his path forward seemed fairly clear. The governorship would be open in 2018, while senior Senator Inhofe, in his eighties, would likely retire in the next several years. Pruitt could do in Oklahoma City what Abbott had done in 2014 in Austin.
Then came November 8, 2016.
Nobody expected that President Trump would be a friend to the environment, given just how shamelessly—and dishonestly—he had pandered to the coal industry during his presidential campaign, all but promising to restore the halcyon days of 1920. But the president-elect loved to draw an audience with the possibility of surprise. On December 5, Trump met with Al Gore, the former vice president and environmental activist, in Trump Tower. On his way out, Gore told reporters the meeting was “a sincere search for areas of common ground.”
That was a clever feint. Two days later, Pruitt walked through the same lobby. “Pruitt was a guy we had targeted for a long time,” Bannon said later. The energy guys liked him; so did McGahn, a quiet but insistent adherent to conservative ideology.
Where Bannon saw an able soldier in his war on the administrative state, employees at EPA saw a smirking destroyer of everything they had been working to accomplish. “We were terrified when Scott Pruitt was nominated,” an EPA employee later recalled to New York magazine. “He seemed to be somebody who understood the legal underpinnings of our work and the ways to legally unbind it. He’s competent in the wrong ways.”
That would prove an accurate assessment, but only to a point. Pruitt would not turn out to be quite as competent as he once seemed. And he was more dishonest and deranged than anyone could imagine, so that when it came time to pack up his things in July 2018, he managed to make Tom Price’s grotesque abuse of government services seem like the theft of a pencil sharpener. But that was more than a year away, and the moment when Pruitt would become the butt of jokes on late-night television seemed unimaginable.
Democrats vociferously opposed Pruitt’s nomination, but they were powerless to stop it; Rob Porter had done his due diligence in taking Pruitt around the Hill, making sure that nobody in the Republican conference suddenly developed an independent spirit. None would.
Pruitt greeted his new employees on February 21, 2017, at an address at EPA headquarters just down the block from the White House. “I believe that we as an agency, and we as a nation, can be both pro-energy and jobs and pro-environment,” Pruitt said. “But we don’t have to choose between the two.” He then added a sentiment that was jarring for someone who was to lead an agency tasked with protecting the environment against humanity’s encroachments: “I don’t believe,” Pruitt said, “we can be better as a country.”
The very notion of environmentalism, with its language of remediation and redemption, presumed the exact opposite. Pruitt’s religious faith—he was a Southern Baptist, a deacon at his suburban Tulsa church—explained this unfounded optimism regarding the effects of human activity on the natural world. A feature of Pruitt’s faith was premillennialism, a conviction that the return of Jesus Christ was imminent. If that was the case, worrying about sea levels and ozone layers was pointless. In this way, Pruitt harkened back to James G. Watt, the Reagan-era interior secretary who once answered a question about the custodianship of the nation’s natural resources by telling a congressional committee, “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.”
No federal department suffered as much under Trump as EPA. A climate scientist who came to EPA in September 2016 was thrilled to be working on the vanguard of her field. “It felt really amazing,” she remembered more than two years later. Recent achievements included the Paris accords and the Clean Power Plan, on which President Hillary Clinton was expected to build. The transition documents were written with her in mind. But these had to be rewritten, and simplified, come November 9.
The transition was slow and ominous. The most trenchant impression for the climate scientist was of Myron Ebell, the global warming denier, lurking in the halls. Once, as she came off an elevator, Ebell waved at her. “It was creepy,” she recalled. How did he know who she was? And if he did know, was it because she worked on climate change? Unfamiliar faces were greeted at the Pennsylvania Avenue headquarters with suspicious glances from career staffers. The strangers could have been colleagues from another part of the building, but many feared that the new administration was sending in political operatives to root out opposition to its pro-energy agenda.
There was good reason to worry about Scott Pruitt and the people he was bringing with him. The new administrator’s chief of staff would be Ryan Jackson, who had been chief of staff to Senator Inhofe, who brought a snowball to the Senate floor in 2015 to show that global warming was not taking place. In time, several other Inhofe alumni would come to fill out Pruitt’s team, even as Inhofe himself gradually lost faith in his fellow Oklahoman.
Oklahomans came to form a retinue around Pruitt, including several who had worked with him back home. The most prominent among these were the sisters Millan and Sydney M. Hupp, who had done political work for Pruitt and would serve as two of his closest advisers at EPA headquarters. Sarah A. Greenwalt, a lawyer who worked in the Oklahoma attorney general’s office under Pruitt, joined EPA as a high-ranking adviser.
Pruitt also attracted an astonishing number of officials who migrated from lobbying groups that had business before the EPA, that business being the eradication of EPA regulations. Samantha Dravis—Pruitt’s closest adviser, who earned a reputation from career staffers as a screamer—had worked for the Republican Attorneys General Association. Dr. Nancy B. Beck, named a high-ranking official in the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, came, like several other Pruitt hires, from the American Chemistry Council, an industry lobbying group that worked to lessen the already not-too-tight regulations on the eighty thousand chemicals used in one form or another in the United States. Sure enough, Beck set about calling into question what had been considered settled science. Under her direction, the EPA moved to lift bans on chlorpyrifos, a harmful pesticide, and perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, a carcinogen.
William L. Wehrum, who headed the Office of Air and Radiation, sued the EPA thirty-one times on behest of private industry. Robert Phalen, appointed to lead an EPA science advisory board, once expressed disappointment that “modern air is a little too clean for optimum health.”
Pruitt and his political appointees were sequestered on the third floor, the administrator himself in the lavish, wood-paneled office that had once been the refuge of the postmaster general. Not that most career employees got anywhere near Pruitt’s inner sanctum. They knew that they did not belong on the third floor, where everyone was always pecking away on a smartphone, and where young women in high heels looked like clones of Ivanka Trump (it was hard not to notice that Pruitt, who came to Washington without his wife, surrounded himself with young and attractive women). The hallways were decorated with framed photographs of Pruitt posing with ordinary Americans, carefully curated to showcase people of different races and occupations. There were also photographs of Pruitt and Trump. These were paid for by the American taxpayer.
White House officials were annoyed when they learned of Pruitt’s taste for expensive interior design. “He wanted the Palace of Versailles for his office,” one of those officials would complain. But there was nothing to be done about it, because Pruitt indicated plainly that he would not take instructions unless they came from Trump himself.
There was little communication between Pruitt and career staffers. To learn what he had in mind for the EPA, they watched Fox News. The network, for its part, was eager to have Pruitt, and to treat him gently on air. Before several 2017 appearances on Fox & Friends—a program so popular with Trump that it amounted to a daily presidential briefing—producers allowed Pruitt to scrutinize and sign off on the script, a privilege rarely afforded to government officials outside of dictatorships.
By the late spring of 2017, Pruitt had assembled a formidable shock force of oil-and-gas lobbyists, climate-change deniers, and conservative ideologues. If the work of deconstructing the administrative state were a competition among cabinet members, Pruitt would have easily had the lead. He thought himself immensely good at the task. In public appearances, he often wore a smirk, which seemed to annoy his liberal adversaries to no end. At EPA headquarters, career staffers who had served Republicans and Democrats but had never served anyone like Trump opted for a strategy of “hunker down and survive,” as senior EPA staffer Christopher Zarba put it.
The work itself was miserable, made so by Pruitt and his appointees. In the spring of 2017, letters poured in from around the country from children of all ages, asking Pruitt about his position on climate change, begging him to do something about this visibly worsening crisis. Career staffers were not allowed to answer letters until responses were vetted by political appointees, who were intent on not making even the slightest concession on global warming. The review could take months. Even then, the result was often an insulting, nonsensical “Thank you.” It pained career staffers to lie to children. Short of resigning, there was nothing they could do.
“A lot of things had to go through headquarters that didn’t have to go through headquarters before,” said Loreen Targos, a shop steward with the American Federation of Government Employees who worked as a physical scientist in the EPA’s regional office in Chicago. One colleague working on air pollution was constantly bullied with invocations of “cooperative federalism,” a favorite Pruitt phrase that amounted to nothing more than code for the loosening of environmental regulations.
Some of the political appointees at least tried to make an effort. At briefings with career staffers, Bill Wehrum liked to call himself “the adult in the room,” which everyone understood to be a dig at the increasingly unhinged Pruitt. But his adulthood only went so far. At one briefing, he took umbrage at a report on soil science. “I thought this was supposed to be a neutral report,” he complained. The career staffers were stunned. Scientific findings were apolitical, even if they demanded a political response, and that Wehrum failed to grasp this point was downright chilling. His briefers were also told to stop using the collective plural “we” when discussing such reports. Wehrum found that usage passive-aggressive because it implied that EPA staffers were aligned with scientists. He wanted them aligned with Pruitt.
On June 1, 2017, the president indicated that he would withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accords, a nonbinding agreement on the reduction of carbon emissions. Pruitt sat in the audience as Trump spoke in the Rose Garden. The next day, Pruitt appeared in the White House briefing room to praise Trump for his “very courageous decision.” Pruitt reminded everyone that “we have nothing to be apologetic about as a country.”
It would turn out that the most revealing thing said in the briefing room that afternoon would come from Sean Spicer, not Scott Pruitt. In introducing the EPA administrator, Spicer asked reporters to be considerate of Pruitt’s time, since he had “a flight to get to” that Friday afternoon.
Pruitt was, in fact, flying quite a bit, as later investigations would reveal. Almost every weekend, he flew back home, the trips subsidized by the federal government. One day of pseudo-campaigning around Oklahoma by Pruitt and his staff cost the American taxpayer $14,434. In the first six months of the Trump administration, Pruitt, who had decried the wanton spending of Washington bureaucrats, accrued a travel bill of $107,441.
Some of this perambulation involved Pruitt meeting with farmers, ranchers, and energy company representatives who wanted a repeal of the Obama-era Waters of the United States rule, which expanded on the regulations of the Clean Water Act. Willing, as always, to play the corporate handmaiden, Pruitt supported the rule’s repeal, crowing about the need for “regulatory certainty,” a nonsensical Orwellianism he especially liked. He even made an advertisement against the rule for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, a lobbying group. Pruitt may not have been especially astute, but he had chutzpah to spare.
Back in Oklahoma, when he was the attorney general, Pruitt had spent extravagantly on a Tulsa outpost in the Bank of America Center skyscraper, though much cheaper options—such as keeping the Tulsa branch of the attorney general’s office in the Sun Building—were readily available, according to records obtained by E&E News. Pruitt similarly made the most of Washington, too. His office at EPA headquarters was spacious and paneled in dark wood, a monument to public service. Pruitt wanted more, seeing his own importance as only a truly inconsequential man could. Even as he bemoaned the cost of government regulations, he saw no problem with spending nearly $10,000 on decorating his own office, including $2,963 for a standing desk. He spent $1,560 on pens from a high-end Washington jeweler. These, EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox would later explain, were intended for “foreign counterparts and dignitaries.”
Career staffers saw through Pruitt’s pompous façade, and rumors of Pruitt’s excesses began circulating among EPA employees. In one story that made the rounds, Pruitt traveled to an EPA site in a western state. He was supposed to exit his van so that an agency photographer could snap a few pictures, but then someone casually mentioned to Pruitt that there were rattlesnakes around. This news spooked Pruitt, and he stayed in the van the rest of his time on the ground. (What a striking contrast this was to Lyndon Johnson, who, when taking a CBS crew around his ranch in the Hill Country of Texas, got out of the car to urinate. This alarmed one member of the crew. “Aren’t you afraid a rattlesnake might bite it?” No, the president was not afraid. “Hell, it is part rattlesnake,” he answered.)
“We questioned his psychological health,” said career staffer Zarba. There was good reason to. Laughably paranoid about being undermined by EPA officials, Pruitt had a part of his office torn out so that a steel-lined private communication booth, sitting on a floor of concrete, could be installed. Pruitt was later asked, in congressional testimony, why he needed such a booth when one was already available in EPA headquarters. He had no good answer. He also had his office swept for listening devices and outfitted with biometric locks. This madness had a considerable price tag: $43,000.
At the same time, Pruitt had no compunction about mistreating the people who worked for him. He was known to yell at both senior career employees and political appointees. “His staff was coaching me on how to be yelled at” ahead of a meeting with the administrator, Zarba remembered: “Don’t make a face. Don’t ask questions.” He disregarded the advice. Zarba left EPA on his own terms. In retirement, he would spend his days in Annapolis, sailing. He was one of seven hundred employees who fled the EPA in Pruitt’s first year, nearly a third of them scientists. If there was any true Bannonite deconstruction happening in the federal government, it was at the EPA on Pruitt’s watch.
The feelings of career staffers were best represented by Michael Cox, a Seattle-area climate expert who had spent twenty-seven years at the EPA. On March 31, 2017, he sent a resignation letter to Pruitt. “I have worked under six Administrations with political appointees leading EPA from both parties,” Cox wrote. “This is the first time I remember staff openly dismissing and mocking the environmental policies of an Administration and by extension you, the individual selected to implement the policies.” The letter contained eight sections. “Please Step Back and Listen to EPA Career Staff,” the last of them was titled.
This was not going to happen. Pruitt saw himself not as a servant, and certainly not as a bureaucrat, but as a world-historical figure who could take as he pleased because he was above the laws that constrained ordinary men. Just a week after Trump indicated his desire to withdraw the United States from the Paris accords (the withdrawal itself would take time, and Trump would sometimes hint at having second thoughts), Pruitt went to Rome, on a trip organized by Leonard A. Leo of the Federalist Society. Pruitt attended a private mass at the Vatican. He also dined at La Terrazza, the sumptuous rooftop restaurant of the Hotel Eden, with Cardinal George Pell, who stood accused of multiple acts of pedophilia in his native Australia. EPA staffers did their best to keep the meeting secret. In the end, they failed.
The combination of wanderlust and self-promotion was genuinely impressive. In December 2017, Pruitt went on a trip to Morocco, which was organized by the lobbyist Richard Smotkin. Pruitt pitched Moroccan authorities on American natural gas, an odd bit of salesmanship for the nation’s top environmental regulator. He had also planned a trip to Israel in early 2018, a necessary visit for any American politician trying to make a play for the Jewish-American lobby ahead of a presidential run. But stories about Pruitt’s abuse of power were starting to come out—though not at nearly the rate at which they would be landing come spring—and the preposterously vain and purposeless trip was canceled.
Within the EPA, there were small acts of resistance to Pruitt’s agenda and excesses, most of which spoke to career staffers’ loathing of Pruitt and also their inability to do much about it. They were powerless, and they knew it, and Pruitt knew it. Still, they tried. At the one-year anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, a prankster graced EPA headquarters with a large poster that showed several photographs of Pruitt and Trump.
“A Year of Great Achievements for Coal, Gas, and Oil Billionaires,” the poster said, with several bullet points below:
Just like Trump, Pruitt had abettors who encouraged his worst impulses because they figured the arrangement could benefit them.
Pruitt’s grandiosity (and its attendant paranoia) was helped along by Pasquale “Nino” Perrotta, a longtime security agent at the EPA who had previously worked in law enforcement in New York City, helping to take down members of Italian organized crime. He later moved to federal security work, joining the U.S. Secret Service in 1995 and the EPA in 2004. Despite his employment in the federal government, in 2016 Perrotta decided to also provide security for David J. Pecker, the National Enquirer publisher who was a close ally of President Trump. This was about as kosher as a ham sandwich.
Perrotta became Pruitt’s security chief after the previous EPA security official, Eric Weese, was dismissed from the position for raising questions about Pruitt’s conduct. Perrotta had no such questions. He stoked Pruitt’s vanity, and benefited in the process. It was the private firm he was running on the side that undertook the gratuitous “sweep” of Pruitt’s office for listening devices. And it was Perrotta who suggested that Pruitt surround himself with an army of nineteen security officers. Interpreting the criticism of ordinary Americans as “threats,” Perrotta urged Pruitt to fly first class, which Pruitt readily agreed to do. Perrotta also had Pruitt travel in an armored Chevy Suburban that leased for $10,200 per year and whose “armor” included bulletproof seats.
Taking on the trappings of a third-world dictator, Pruitt took his security staff along when his family visited Disneyland, and when he went to see the University of Oklahoma football team play in the Rose Bowl. He wanted his staff to look into a $100,000 per month private jet service. He wanted a bulletproof desk and high-end bulletproof vests, because he imagined himself the potential victim of an assassination attempt. He was that important, at least in his own mind.
And yes, ordinary people did hate Pruitt, but mostly because they saw him as a vainglorious fool. One of the “threats” against Pruitt used to justify his security expenses cited a Newsweek cover adorned with the administrator’s face, only with a mustache appended. Someone pasted this doctored cover in an elevator at EPA’s headquarters, evidently leading Pruitt to conclude that his life was in danger. Another threat was a tweet directed at Pruitt and Senate Majority Leader McConnell by a person in Paragould, Arkansas. Interviewed by federal agents, the suspect said that they had been “drinking while watching the Rachel Maddow show and posted the tweets as a flippant comment, not realizing at the time that they could be considered a threat.”
The belief that he was under siege allowed Pruitt to justify any expense, no matter how unnecessary. In one email to other staffers, Perrotta wrote that Pruitt “encourages the use” of sirens when traveling in his SUV. What would have necessitated the deployment of emergency signals? A reservation at Le Diplomate, a favorite Pruitt restaurant in Logan Circle that could be difficult to reach from EPA headquarters during the evening rush. One of his visits to the restaurant came just hours after Trump indicated his intention to withdraw from the Paris accords. The restaurant’s French cuisine had to have tasted especially rich that evening.
Lavish was the word all around for Scott Pruitt, even as he and Trump looked to cut funding for the agency. Needing a place to live, Pruitt rented a Capitol Hill condominium from Vicki Hart, a healthcare lobbyist whose husband, J. Steven Hart, worked for the corporate lobbying firm of Williams & Jensen (and who had been present at the Trump transition meeting at BakerHostetler’s offices right before the election). The apartment, in a refurbished row house on a prime block, could have easily gone for $3,000 a month, but Pruitt paid only fifty dollars per night, and only on nights when he stayed there.
Even then, he proved a miserable tenant. He refused to take out the garbage. His daughter McKenna scratched the wooden floors with her luggage when she stayed with him, in violation of the lease (McKenna was a law school student at the University of Virginia; she interned over the summer of 2017 at the White House, and there were accusations that her father’s influence helped her land both prestigious positions). One day, the large security force Pruitt had amassed around himself grew concerned because he wasn’t responding to messages. They broke down the door of the Harts’ condo, only to find Pruitt inside, apparently asleep (by the summer of 2018, unproven rumors about Pruitt’s personal life had become as notorious as horseflies, giving rise to suspicions—some sinister, some silly—whenever a new report about his behavior appeared). The damage amounted to $2,640, to be paid by Pruitt’s fellow Americans.
There was reason to believe the Harts did not rent to Pruitt out of pure munificence. Despite Pruitt’s unconvincing assertions to the contrary, Steven Hart had business before the EPA pertaining to clients Coca-Cola and the pork purveyor Smithfield Foods. Then there was the Harts’ attempt to pressure Pruitt into hiring a young man Jimmy Guiliano, who had recently graduated from the Naval Academy. “This kid who is important to us,” Steven Hart said of Guiliano in one email to Pruitt’s chief of staff. Despite his purported importance, Guiliano did not get a job at the EPA.
By early August 2017, Pruitt had apparently had enough of the Harts’ condominium on Capitol Hill. He spent a month in Tulsa, then returned to Washington. He and his wife, Marlyn, moved to a U Street apartment, but as top EPA aide Millan Hupp later said in congressional testimony, “they were not comfortable in the area.” As energy and environment reporter Miranda Green of The Hill noted on Twitter, U Street is “the historical African American district in DC.” An EPA spokesperson told her the issue was actually a noisy Mexican restaurant.
The Pruitts subsequently moved to Eastern Market, near Capitol Hill. They did so by enlisting Hupp’s help as their real estate agent. As she later admitted, she conducted this search while ostensibly working for the EPA, meaning that the American taxpayer was subsidizing Pruitt’s journey through the intricacies of the district’s real estate market. Using a federal employee to conduct personal business was grossly illegal, a perfect example of the government corruption Trump had promised to eradicate.
That fall, Pruitt also dispatched Hupp to purchase a used mattress from the Trump International Hotel. The request was almost too bizarre for mockery. And though mockery did pour down on Pruitt yet again, the yearning remained unrealized: the hotel did not sell mattresses. Even great men sometimes had to settle for soiled bedding that was not the soiled bedding they had hoped for.
Much about Pruitt’s strange and scandalous tenure at the EPA would not be known until the spring and summer of 2018, when every day seemed to bring news of a new scandal for Pruitt. For just about all of 2017, he had been a man on the ascent. The Los Angeles Times deemed him Trump’s “most adept and dangerous hatchet man” in the summer of 2017, a month after the Paris withdrawal, when Pruitt’s stock was as high as it would ever be. Even Pruitt’s most vociferous critics were awed by his regulatory rollback. One senior official at the Environmental Defense Fund worried that he could become a mainstay of American political life—a U.S. senator, perhaps even president. Pruitt did visit Iowa that December.
In early January 2018—now just a few months before the tsunami of scandal would come crashing down on the pudgy, self-satisfied mandarin—the EPA published a list of sixty-seven environmental safeguards Pruitt had either fully rolled back or was in the process of undoing. These included the 2015 Waters of the United States rule and the Clean Power Plan, which established nationwide carbon emissions standards for power plants. Here was the regulatory equivalent of the German blitzkrieg across Poland: so extensive, and effective, that no front was safe. An Obama administration rule had curbed power plant emissions of mercury and arsenic, among the most destructive elements to human health. Despite scientific consensus about how harmful those emissions were, Pruitt ordered the rule under “review,” thus indicating his intention to weaken it.
Pruitt could do little about the nation’s environmental laws, but he had great say in how and when those laws were applied, if they were going to be applied at all. Using the complexity (and obscurity) of the federal rule-making process, Pruitt proposed to either overturn or arrest the implementation of Obama-era rules with remarkable efficiency. In April 2017, for example, he wrote a letter to energy executives announcing an administrative stay on a rule regarding air pollution by energy producers. He made other such decisions regarding rules about toxic wastewater effluents from energy plants, as well as a program designed to address chemical accidents and air quality standards for ground-level ozone, or smog.
Betsy Southerland, who spent thirty years as a scientist at the EPA but chose to retire shortly after Pruitt’s arrival, was confident the courts would ultimately prevent Pruitt from entirely undoing Obama’s legacy, just as the courts had almost entirely halted Pruitt’s assault on Obama’s regulations from Oklahoma. However, she also figured that given all the forthcoming legal challenges, plus the motions and countermotions they would involve, the nation would not return to the environmental regulatory structure that was in place when Obama left office until 2028.
Even with all the enemies Pruitt was making on the left, the man who eventually brought Pruitt down was not a rogue environmentalist or a creature of the Deep State lodged within the EPA. It was, instead, a young Trump political appointee named Kevin Chmielewski, a clean-cut Republican who became the unlikely hero of the environmental movement.
The nation first heard Chmielewski’s name in April 2016, when then candidate Trump held a rally at Stephen Decatur High School in Berlin, a small coastal town in Maryland. In the midst of the speech, Trump wondered, “Where the hell is Kevin? Get him out here,” Trump commanded. Chmielewski promptly took the stage.
Chmielewski was not one of those functionaries who had always lusted for a proximity to power. He was a lackadaisical student in his youth. “I was one of those knucklehead kids growing up who got straight C’s and D’s,” he would remember in an interview with the Dispatch, a local newspaper. “I was on welfare, I never went to college and I should have been one of those kids that ends up in jail or doing dishes somewhere.” He took up surfing, and after high school, went into the Coast Guard. In 2003, however, he got a taste of politics when he was given the chance to do advance work—the work done in advance of a dignitary’s arrival at a given location—for Vice President Dick Cheney.
Coming into Washington often led to delusions of grandeur, but there was no sense that Chmielewski succumbed to that temptation. “I attribute my success to the people in our school system and our community who raised me,” he told the Dispatch after his appearance on stage with Trump. Even in the midst of a presidential season marked by daily shows of grandiosity and indecency (and by no means only from Trump), Chmielewski maintained his plain, dignified composure. Later, pro-Pruitt propagandists in the conservative press would labor mightily to call his dignity into question. They would find laughably little success.
In February 2018, Vice President Mike Pence went to Asia, and Chmielewski went with him. When he returned stateside, he was told he no longer had a job at the EPA. The dismissal was not made public until April, when the New York Times reported that Chmielewski was one of five high-ranking EPA officials pushed out of the agency for trying to restrain Pruitt in his imitation of a mogul’s lifestyle. They included Eric Weese, the security official who spoke out against Pruitt’s use of car sirens and lights, only to have Nino Perrotta gladly take his place.
Of the five, Chmielewski was the only political appointee, a Trump loyalist, who could not be dismissed as a disgruntled career staffer. Pruitt failed to understand this, to grasp that he was making an enemy who was determined to seek out revenge.
That would not prove especially difficult, given the intensifying focus on Pruitt. Chmielewski went to House Democrats, finding a receptive audience in Representative Cummings, the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee. A week after the Times published its report on Chmielewski’s dismissal, Cummings and other Democrats sent a letter to Pruitt. It was clear that Chmielewski told them about everything: the insane security measures, the use of Millan Hupp as a taxpayer-funded real estate agent, improper raises to favored deputies. He even told the legislators that Pruitt demanded his flights be booked with Delta so that he could earn points from his airline of choice.
Finally, the letter said that Chmielewski and others were either fired or otherwise marginalized for trying to check Pruitt’s deepening megalomania. In Chmielewski’s case, there was a threatening call with Perrotta, who said he “didn’t give a fuck” about who may have been listening in.
Pruitt was clearly afraid of Chmielewski, dispatching his press secretary, Wilcox, to place damaging news items in conservative publications like the Washington Free Beacon and the Daily Caller. Chmielewski’s agenda was not anti-Trump, it was pro-decency. Some Trump loyalists did scoff at the favorable media depictions of Chmielewski, pointing to what they saw as self-aggrandizing behavior. There were rumors that he was staying with Corey Lewandowski, the former Trump campaign manager who was running a consultancy out of a bright and roomy Capitol Hill house. Nobody ever explained what the Chmielewski-Lewandowski connection meant, how deep it was, why it was relevant in this city of complexly intertwined connections. The point was to damage Chmielewski, to blunt his claims through insinuation.
This campaign did not work. The media in Washington may have been a little too adept at turning a hangnail into a scandal, yet in the case of Pruitt, the alarm was commensurate with the administrator’s behavior. And the alarm only got louder as some of Pruitt’s top aides turned against him, resigning their EPA positions while also offering damning testimony about what those positions had entailed. Dravis testified before a House committee in late June about how Pruitt had her embark on the wildly unethical enterprise of helping his wife find a job with the Republican Attorneys General Association. That effort was not to be confused with Sydney Hupp’s overtures to Chick-fil-A, the fast-food chain in which Marlyn Pruitt sought to become a franchisee.
The mattress story—which came from Millan Hupp’s testimony—broke on June 4 and marked the final, depraved stage of Pruitt’s brief but florid career as a federal employee. Now the stories came as relentlessly as a summer shower over Washington: He ordered his subordinates to drive him around Washington so he could find an overpriced Ritz-Carlton moisturizer he was fond of. Like a cut-rate potentate, he commanded underlings to fetch him protein bars. By the end of it all, there were sixteen separate investigations into Pruitt’s transgressions, though that number did not do full justice to the hubris of a small, compact man who imagined himself bound for great things.
“Every fucking day this guy had a new story,” a senior White House official later said. There was something impressively insistent about the corruption, as if Scott Pruitt genuinely thought himself invincible.
Some speculated that Pruitt was finally forced to resign after a report that he had openly lobbied before Trump for U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions to be fired, so that he could take his job. “He was a little too aggressive,” Bannon thought. He made the president uncomfortable with his clumsy displays of ambition, his desperate hanging around the White House mess hall, like a teenager yearning to sit at the cool kids’ table.
Maybe it was just that Trump realized that Pruitt was a bargain-basement lackey, and that there were innumerable other lackeys who could do the job he did without generating a year’s worth of headlines on a weekly basis. Laura Ingraham, the influential Fox News prime time host, had first called for Pruitt to be fired in June. She did it again on July 3, in a brutally compact message: “Pruitt is the swamp. Drain it.” Two days later, Scott Pruitt joined the ranks of the unemployed.
Pruitt followed in the footsteps of Tom Price, leaving the EPA on an obsequious and self-righteous note, with a resignation letter that praised Trump’s “courage, steadfastness and resolute commitment to get results for the American people.” The tone indicated that Pruitt was already planning on a political comeback in his native Oklahoma. An endorsement from Trump would help, so Pruitt laid it on thick as lard. “I believe you are serving as President today because of God’s providence,” the letter continued. “I believe that same providence brought me into your service.”
The victim ploy worked, to an extent. “The swamp came after him,” Bannon later said, calling Pruitt “by far the most effective” cabinet member. “That’s the reason he’s gone,” Bannon added. “If you’re effective, they’re going to come after you.” It was comforting to think so, but was it true? Had the likes of Laura Ingraham really joined the Resistance?
Fearsome as he seemed during his tenure, Pruitt left with a legacy that was not likely to survive for long. That had been the case with his time as Oklahoma’s attorney general. Not one of Pruitt’s fourteen challenges to the EPA proved successful in fully getting rid of an EPA rule. Federal courts tossed six of the challenges, while seven others remained in litigation. His one partial victory, on a procedural matter, continued to be the subject of a legal dispute.
Even before Pruitt resigned, the courts were eroding his accomplishments as an anti-environmental crusader. Faced with a lawsuit by fifteen states, Pruitt dropped his objection to a smog rule issued by the Obama administration. And the D.C. Circuit court ruled that he could not stay the rule on air pollution from oil and gas production. After he left the EPA, the agency—facing a near-certain defeat in court—reinstated the glider rule he had undermined.
Pruitt’s successor, Andrew Wheeler, was a former coal lobbyist whose policy aims were identical to Pruitt’s. At least he showed less inclination to waste taxpayer funds. Wheeler had a few scandals of his own, including a fondness for racist social media posts, but these were relatively minor, given the enormity of Pruitt’s corruption.
Zarba, the career EPA staffer, offered a droplet of praise: “He is not as stupid as Pruitt.” That was promising. It was also dangerous. There was no telling what intelligence combined with maliciousness might do to the EPA.