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NYT: Scott Pruitt’s Rocky Relationship With His Aides Set the Stage for His Fall

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/06/climate/scott-pruitt-epa-aides.html

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WASHINGTON — Scott Pruitt came to Washington and assembled an extraordinary team of like-minded conservatives — lawyers, energy lobbyists, free-market Republicans and close allies from his days in Oklahoma. All were committed not only to Mr. Pruitt, but also to his stated mission to be a regulation-buster at the Environmental Protection Agency.

In little more than a year, most of them were gone, chased away by scandal or disillusionment over what they viewed as a loss of focus by a boss distracted by the trappings of power — building an elaborate security team, traveling first class, seeking special benefits for his family — who then blamed his own staff for the missteps.

Mr. Pruitt’s fall from the E.P.A. is a story of his diminishing relationship with many of his closest loyalists. Instead of focusing on making history by reshaping American environmental policy, they found themselves not only defending their actions before investigators, but also calling out Mr. Pruitt in ways that exposed him to public scrutiny and ultimately led to his downfall.

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Among them is Samantha Dravis, Mr. Pruitt’s former top policy chief, who resigned in April. During her tenure, Mr. Pruitt asked her to help with personal matters, like reviewing his apartment lease. Last week she sat on Capitol Hill being questioned by a congressional panel investigating whether Mr. Pruitt had asked her to help his wife land a lucrative job. She was being asked to blame her boss.

“I was explicitly asked by Administrator Pruitt” to help his wife find work, Ms. Dravis told the investigators, according to a transcript of her interview released Thursday afternoon, shortly after Mr. Pruitt resigned. She added, “There’s no reason I can think of why I would want to insert myself into such a situation.”

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Mr. Pruitt became similarly isolated from many of his closest confidants, said David Schnare, a 34-year veteran of the agency who served on President Trump’s transition team and who left the E.P.A. himself after a falling-out with Mr. Pruitt over the rules governing ethanol use in gasoline.

“Who did he have left?” Mr. Schnare said. “He didn’t have much of anybody left.”

Mr. Pruitt has proud supporters, among them Michael McKenna, a Republican energy lobbyist who describes him as the outsider that the E.P.A. needed, someone who had built a career far from Washington and therefore could forcefully shake up the status quo. “Like all of us, he’s his own worst enemy,” Mr. McKenna said, but he was changing the culture of the agency and eliminating government regulations.

“A big part of the reason why the left went after Scott is because they disagreed with what he was doing at the agency,” Mr. McKenna added.

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Senator James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican and longtime supporter of Mr. Pruitt, praised his “great work to reduce the nation’s regulatory burdens.” In recent months, Mr. Inhofe had criticized some of Mr. Pruitt’s actions, but on Thursday, shortly after the resignation, he said Mr. Pruitt was crucial to Mr. Trump’s mission. “He was single-minded at restoring the E.P.A. to its proper statutory authority and ending the burdensome regulations that have stifled economic growth across the country,” Mr. Inhofe said.

Nevertheless, even as Mr. Pruitt proposed historic rollbacks of government rules, jokes about a used mattress, a Chick-fil-A fast food franchise and a $50-a-night condo became shorthand in American culture for an E.P.A. under fire as ethics crises consumed his top aides one by one.

Millan and Sydney Hupp, sisters and Pruitt family friends from Oklahoma, became Mr. Pruitt’s Washington gatekeepers, helping book trips nationwide to meet with oil executives, coal miners, farmers and other groups. But Mr. Pruitt also asked Sydney Hupp to set up a meeting with Chick-fil-A to seek a franchise for his wife. She resigned last summer.

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Millan Hupp stepped down in June after Mr. Pruitt blamed her for telling investigators that, among other things, she helped him try to buy a used mattress from the Trump International Hotel. The same day she quit, so did Sarah Greenwalt, Mr. Pruitt’s senior counsel overseeing water policy. Ms. Greenwalt and Ms. Hupp were given substantial pay raises that Mr. Pruitt denied having approved and later rescinded.

And Mr. Pruitt’s top press official, Liz Bowman, formerly of the American Chemistry Council, left in May after he blamed her for the media attention he was getting for renting a condo for $50 a night from the wife of an energy lobbyist.

The E.P.A. did not respond to requests for comment on Mr. Pruitt’s relationship with his senior aides. Mr. Pruitt’s spokesman, Jahan Wilcox, has denied any wrongdoing on the part of the administrator.

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Perhaps the highest-profile departure was that of Kevin Chmielewski. He had arrived at the E.P.A. in April 2017 and was soon named deputy chief of staff for operations.

He came with unimpeachable Republican credentials, having served as an aide to several major Republican presidential candidates in the past two decades, including Mitt Romney and John McCain. He had worked on the Trump campaign from its start.

But in his first months at the agency, Mr. Chmielewski said on Friday, he began to question whether some of Mr. Pruitt’s actions were hurting the deregulatory mission he had signed on for. He cited Mr. Pruitt’s spending on security measures and first-class flights as well as his requests that aides handle personal tasks for him, like picking up dry cleaning, while also keeping some of his meetings off his publicly released schedule.

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“You can’t do that stuff,” said Mr. Chmielewski, who left in February after his own falling-out with Mr. Pruitt. “I was always waiting for the vice president’s office or somebody at the White House to step in and say, ‘Wait a minute, guys, this has to stop.’ But it never happened.”

Mr. Chmielewski took a temporary job as a waiter in West Ocean City, Md., at the Sunset Grille and Teasers dockside bar. Next week, he said, he will be returning to Washington to testify to congressional investigators.

Ryan Jackson, the E.P.A. chief of staff, has disputed Mr. Chmielewski’s depictions of the agency and Mr. Pruitt, characterizing him in an interview this week as a disgruntled former employee.

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Over the course of his 16 months as E.P.A. administrator, Mr. Pruitt unveiled numerous major policy initiatives, such as the rollback of Obama-era rules on vehicle tailpipe emissions and the scaling back of a regulation on water pollution. However, some of the policies faced criticism for being hastily assembled in ways that made them vulnerable to challenge.

That is at least in part because he resisted advice from career E.P.A. staff members as well as his senior political aides, Mr. Schnare said. For example, Mr. Pruitt preferred not to have Kevin Minoli, the agency’s principal deputy general counsel and top ethics official, attend senior staff meetings, Mr. Schnare said, because Mr. Minoli’s expertise put him in a position to push back against policies.

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