White House Gives Scott Pruitt the Kiss of Death

Last week, in the ongoing competition between Trump administration officials to win the title of “Most Corrupt Member of the Administration,” one man pulled ahead of the pack. Not only has Scott Pruitt racked up hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars in luxe travel charges because apparently coach is “politically toxic,” but the E.P.A. administrator is also systematically undermining the core mission of his agency, which is largely to prevent Americans from treating the Earth like a porta-potty. Pruitt has spent the majority of his tenure meeting with industry executives, a fact that was driven home last week when we learned that Pruitt is quite literally in bed with special interests in that he regularly bunks in a lobbyist’s Washington townhouse—located in a neighborhood where other units have rented for $5,000 a month—for just 50 bucks a night. (Both Pruitt and his landlord have insisted that the arrangement was totally legit.) And on Monday, in what we’re confident is purely a coincidence, The New York Times reported this:

In a March 2017 letter to the State Department, the E.P.A. said it had no major environmental objections to the expansion of Enbridge Inc.’s Alberta Clipper line, which would allow “hundreds of thousands more barrels of oil a day to flow through this pipeline to the United States from Canadian tar sands.” That was a major reversal of fortunes for Enbridge, which, at the end of the Obama administration, was fined $61 million for a 2010 incident wherein its pipeline sent “hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil” gushing into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River, as well as other bodies of water. (The fine had the distinction of being the second-biggest in the history of the Clean Water Act, coming second only to the one over the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico.)

Per the Times, the letter was issued while Pruitt was living in the Washington condo, which is owned in part by Vicki Hart, the wife of J. Steven Hart, the chairman of lobbying firm Williams & Jensen. In the firm’s disclosure report from early 2017, Williams & Jensen lists Enbridge as a client regarding “issues affecting pipelines and construction of new pipelines,” a fact that Pruitt’s office insists is mere happenstance: “Any attempt to draw that link is patently false,” Liz Bowman, a spokeswoman for Pruitt, told the Times. (A spokesman for Williams & Jensen likewise told the Times that the firm was not involved in lobbying efforts on the Enbridge pipeline while Pruitt lived in the condo, and that it had “not worked on similar regulatory issues for Enbridge in the past year.’’)

As this is the Trump administration, there’s was always the chance—the likelihood, even—that Pruitt’s questionable ethical practices would fly under the radar. But according to Politico, the slew of bad press Pruitt has attracted has prompted Chief of Staff John Kelly to weigh telling the E.P.A. administrator to clean out his desk. (It seems he’s clung on this long in part because he’s done such a good job gutting Obama-era regulations.) And if the Times headline wasn’t enough to spur Kelly to action, The Washington Post reported on Monday that Pruitt’s staff explored the idea of leasing a private jet to accommodate his “travel needs” (the idea was scrapped after estimates came in at roughly $100,000 a month), while The Atlantic revealed that Pruitt himself bypassed the White House to give two of his closest aides huge raises last year.

Taken together, the sheer volume and variety of leaks suggests that someone is working overtime to get Pruitt fired, if not for turning the environment into a urinal and telling his industry pals to take a leak, then for embarrassing the administration with his no good, very bad judgement. And though so far the White House claims to be totally behind Pruitt telling reporters. . .

. . . which, incidentally, was approximately the same thing the West Wing had to say about about H.R. McMaster, right before canning him.