Trump's scandal-plagued EPA chief Scott Pruitt is back

WASHINGTON — It helps to have the endorsement of former President Donald Trump when running for the U.S. Senate in deep red Oklahoma. Accordingly, the website for Senate candidate Scott Pruitt features what seems like a certified blessing: “He’ll go and do great things,” it quotes Trump as saying.

What the website doesn’t say is that Trump uttered those words as Pruitt was forced out by the White House from his position as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, a scandal-plagued tenure that eventually became an embarrassment to Trumpian and establishment Republicans alike.

As scandals piled up for Pruitt in the spring and summer of 2018, Trump stood by the former Oklahoma attorney general who had been recommended for the EPA position by the energy industry. But after attacks on Pruitt by Fox News primetime anchor Laura Ingraham, Trump dropped his support and forced Pruitt to resign.

“Obviously, you know the controversies with Scott,” Trump told reporters on July 5, 2018, as environmentalists cheered Pruitt’s resignation. He wished Pruitt “a wonderful life,” a typically Trumpian send-off that is not as warm as it might seem.

Now, Pruitt is back — or at least hopes to be. He has recently worked as a coal lobbyist in Indiana, but with James Inhofe, the senior senator from Oklahoma, on the cusp of retirement, the perennially ambitious Pruitt would like to make his way back to Washington.

Pruitt announced his intention to run for Inhofe’s seat in April. A campaign video shows the stout onetime college second baseman making a pitch clearly calculated to win the committed pro-Trump conservatives President Biden has labeled the “ultra-MAGA” wing of the Republican Party.

Comparing himself to Winston Churchill, Pruitt claims he was the victim of biased media attacks. “They think they canceled me,” Pruitt says. “But guess what? I’m back.”

But in recent days, new revelations about the extent of Pruitt’s alleged corruption have offered a reminder of how he and other Cabinet members subverted Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” of Washington. Democrats, for instance, are pushing the Department of Justice to investigate David Bernhardt, Trump’s interior secretary, for his approval of an Arizona golf and residential project by a Trump donor. The project had previously been rejected by the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Bernhardt’s predecessor, Ryan Zinke, was recently found to have violated ethics rules by investing in a development in his native Montana. Zinke is now in the midst of a contentious congressional race that could send him back to Washington. Much like Pruitt, he had to leave the Trump administration amid a flurry of ethical violations that, in Zinke’s case, involved aggressively confronting a neighbor.

Pruitt’s reported transgressions are the subject of an Office of Special Counsel report sent late last week to President Biden, as the New York Times revealed. The special counsel, Henry Kerner, wrote that, according to agency whistleblowers, Pruitt “engaged in improper and excessive spending of agency funds on travel and security; used his official position for his personal benefit and the personal benefit of certain EPA staffers; and endangered public safety.”

Although the report on Pruitt’s activities was compiled in 2018, it is being made public only now. The timing is not especially convenient for the Senate candidate, though it is difficult to say how much a campaign oriented against established interests will suffer from the revelations.

For the most part, those revelations add color to an already-colorful portfolio that includes a quest for a used mattress from the Trump International Hotel, dispatching aides to look for high-end moisturizer and trying to pressure fast food outlet Chick-fil-A into making his wife a franchisee.

The report describes how the “historically late” Pruitt asked his security detail to use emergency lights on official vehicles, in contravention of federal protocol.

“Hit them,” Pruitt would say when he wanted to employ sirens to speed up his journey, according to the report; he would also sometimes make his desire known “implicitly through his body language and cues.” Once, the emergency lights were used so Pruitt could pick up his dry cleaning. They were also deployed for the four-block journey between EPA headquarters and the White House, where Pruitt was fond of showing up to the annoyance of some West Wing staffers who saw him as a hanger-on.

The EPA famously spent $43,000 at Pruitt’s insistence for a secure communications booth at EPA headquarters. Though such facilities were already available, Pruitt was widely known for a paranoid temperament.

Although the EPA previously defended Pruitt’s decision to spend taxpayer money on the booth, that changed late last year, according to reporting by E&E News, an outlet covering energy and the environment.

“The EPA concurs that a violation occurred,” Biden-appointed EPA Administrator Michael Regan wrote to the Government Accountability Office, which monitors federal spending. He also confirmed earlier allegations that Pruitt, a self-styled populist, inappropriately spent thousands of dollars on office decor.

Pruitt’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment. A representative for Trump would not say whether the former president would endorse Pruitt.

It seems that affection for Pruitt is not running especially strong in the GOP these days, especially since reminders of Trump-era scandals are unlikely to motivate voters.

One former EPA official contrasted the response to Pruitt’s candidacy with the support engendered by his EPA successor, Andrew Wheeler, when he was nominated by Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s new governor, to run the environmental agency there. (Democrats blocked Wheeler.)

“Over 100 former EPA political appointees signed a letter supporting Andrew Wheeler’s nomination to run Virginia’s Natural Resources Department,” the former EPA official told Yahoo News in a text message, “but nobody is on record supporting Scott Pruitt’s campaign. The goose is cooked.”