Trump Is Said to Ask EPA Chief Scott Pruitt About Controversies

• April 07 2018
• Margaret Talev, Jennifer A Dlouhy

President Donald Trump asked Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt about the controversies surrounding him during a White House meeting on Friday, an administration official said.

President Donald Trump asked Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt about the controversies surrounding him during a White House meeting on Friday, an administration official said.

The official, who asked for anonymity to discuss internal administration matters, said that the president had also reviewed the lease documents for a bedroom in a Capitol Hill condominium that Pruitt had rented from a lobbyist last year.

The topic of the White House meeting was supposed to be federal fuel economy standards, and three administration officials said that were discussed as well.

Pruitt has also been under fire over his explanation of how two close aides secured raises worth tens of thousands of dollars a year over the White House’s objection, and reports that several EPA staff who questioned him were transferred to other jobs.

Pruitt’s former landlord, Vicki Hart, does not have clients with business before the EPA, but the lobbying firm of her husband, J. Steven Hart, has several corporate clients that do.

Pruitt has come under criticism as well for taking first-class flights and having a 24-hour security detail, which his predecessors did not have. At least 20 employees were placed on the detail, some of them reassigned from field work, according a letter from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat. The Associated Press reported on Friday evening that the security costs mran into the millions.

Yet even as accusations of ethical lapses swirl around the EPA chief, conservative stars have been coming out in force to save the job of a zealous advocate of their small-government movement engulfed by allegations of ethical lapses.

Prominent Republicans and leaders of the Tea Party movement -- from publishing executive Steve Forbes to Senator Rand Paul -- are writing op-eds, posting on Twitter, and picking up the phone to personally beseech the president to keep Pruitt at the helm of the EPA.

“He’s a conservative hero,” Dallas investor Doug Deason, whose family has given millions to right-wing candidates, said of Pruitt. “It would be a huge mistake to do anything other than come out and support him.”

High-profile business leaders including billionaire Oklahoma oilman Harold Hamm have also been enlisted to make personal entreaties, and tell the president that Pruitt has done more than other top administration official to ease federal regulations standing in the way of manufacturing, mining, and drilling.

Right Versus Left

The right’s fondness for Pruitt is matched by the animosity he inspires among the political left. Environmentalists have campaigned against him since his confirmation in February 2017, casting him as an unabashed ally of corporate polluters who is dismantling regulations essential to safeguard the land, air and water.

Earlier: EPA Chief in Fox Grilling Denies Knowing Who Raised Aides’ Pay

“It’s a pretty sad statement of the priorities of these right-wing ideologues that they think someone who is clearly unethical and has no respect for taxpayers or the law is okay to keep around, as long as he pushes their dangerous agenda,” said John Coequyt, the Sierra Club’s senior director of federal policy. “Pruitt has been nothing more than their puppet, putting public health at risk to help corporate polluter’s bottom line, and this is exactly why he needs to go.”

Publicly, Trump has offered praise for Pruitt, telling reporters Thursday that he had confidence in the embattled EPA chief and calling him “very courageous” amid a barrage of damaging revelations. Trump underscored that on Friday with a post on Twitter saying Pruitt “is doing a great job but is TOTALLY under siege.”

Nevertheless, Pruitt’s standing at the White House is far from secure.

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly told Trump last week that Pruitt needed to go but the president is resisting firing him, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times reported.

Forbes and Meese

The conservative counter-effort involves darlings of the right. Edwin Meese III, an attorney general in the Reagan administration, former South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, and more than 100 other prominent leaders on the right issued a memo Friday highlighting Pruitt’s policy accomplishments and casting the EPA leader as instrumental to the president’s mission to slash through Washington bureaucracy.

Forbes, the millionaire chairman and editor-in-chief of Forbes Media Inc. who ran for president in 1996 and 2000, wrote an opinion piece for Investor’s Business Daily arguing that Pruitt is under fire simply because he’s been too effective at “boldly redirecting the EPA” and reining in “a once-rogue agency that operated far beyond its constitutional authority.”

Kenneth Cuccinelli, a former Virginia attorney general and Republican gubernatorial candidate, lent his voice to a roundup of praise for Pruitt circulated by the powerful conservative advocacy group FreedomWorks. The group also is recruiting conservative voices to join the cause, with a Twitter campaign urging supporters to call the White House switchboard with endorsements of the EPA chief.

CRC Public Relations, headed by Greg Mueller, the communications director for Pat Buchanan when he ran for president, has joined the fray. The Alexandria, Virginia, firm, has circulated talking points and highlighted pro-Pruitt commentary.

At the same time, Pruitt’s defenders have been making a political argument, with some warning that Trump’s support in Republican presidential primaries two years from now could be undermined if he jettisons one of the most conservative members of his cabinet.

His supporters have also warned that getting any replacement approved by the Senate -- much less one as dogged as Pruitt -- could be impossible.

— With assistance by Ari Natter