Two senior aides to Environmental Protection Agency-hating EPA chief Scott Pruitt have been okayed by the agency’s ethics office to conduct a limited amount of outside consulting work despite their full-time government jobs. In a letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the ethics office redacted the names of the clients.
Although government rules limit the amount of money they can earn from such work to $27,756, in a letter to Pruitt released Monday, Democrats on the committee expressed “serious concern” about potential conflicts of interest and a lack of impartiality.
One of the two aides is John Konkus, the deputy associate administrator for the office of public affairs. He is formerly an executive vice president for Jamestown Associates, a political consulting firm that in 2016 focused on getting a majority of voters in Florida to cast their ballots for Donald Trump. Michael Biesecker of the Associated Press reports:
Konkus also served two years as chief of staff to former Florida Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll. A Republican, Carroll was forced to resign in 2013 over consulting work she had previously done for a scam veteran’s charity that state and federal prosecutors said laundered more than $300 million in proceeds from illegal gambling parlors.
According to Julie Eilperin and Brady Dennis, Konkus has little environmental experience but "personally supervises every grant the agency awards to or solicits from outside groups."
On his online résumé, Konkus notes that his oversight of the grants is being done to “adhere to the policies and principles of the current administration.” The Trump regime’s principles seem to be a word-for-word copy of the Robber Barons’ principles.
Last September, in another report by Eilperin, Konkus’ vetting was looked at askance by critics because he had “told staff that he is on the lookout for ‘the double C-word’—climate change—and repeatedly has instructed grant officers to eliminate references to the subject in solicitations.” James Call reported:
“We’re draining the swamp to ensure decisions about grants are in line with the Agency’s mission and policy priorities,” said EPA spokesman, Jahan Wilcox
The Monday letter to Pruitt was signed by the top Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. of New Jersey, plus Democrats Diana DeGette of Colorado, Kathy Castor of Florida, and Paul Tonko of N.Y. Included were these two paragraphs:
On September 8, 2017, members of the Committee wrote you with concerns regarding politicization of the Agency's grants process and your decision to place Mr. Konkus in charge of vetting hundreds of millions of dollars in grants EPA awards each year. Mr. Konkus has reportedly cancelled nearly $2 million in competitively awarded grants to universities and nonprofit organizations. [...]
A political appointee cutting millions of dollars in funding to EPA grant recipients on what appears to be a politically motivated basis, while at the same time being authorized to serve as a paid media consultant to unnamed outside clients, raises serious concerns of potential conflicts of interest.
Of course, engaging in conflicts of interest is standard operating procedure for Trump, in or out of government. So they’ve got to be asking, what “serious concerns”?
The second aide under scrutiny, Patrick Davis, serves as Pruitt’s special assistant in the Region VIII office of the EPA based in Denver. He ran Trump’s Colorado campaign. He received ethics office permission to take on outside work "as the sales director of Telephone Town Hall Meeting."
Biesecker reports:
According to a 2015 report by ProPublica, Davis was accused two years earlier of defrauding a conservative super PAC called Vote2ReduceDebt, which was funded by an elderly oil tycoon. The group collapsed after Davis allegedly paid nearly $3 million of the PAC’s funds to organizations run by him or his close associates, according to the news report.
Davis told the AP on Monday that the dispute involving Vote2Reduce Debt “was mitigated to a mutually agreed-upon, private, amicable conclusion.”
It took six months for the Energy and Commerce Committee to get its first response in the matter of Konkus, so perhaps around Thanksgiving, they’ll receive some follow-up, including the names of other political appointees doing outside work. Meanwhile, the guy Pruitt has placed in charge of the EPA cookie jar will continue making sure that the Trump regime’s climate science denial is reflected in who gets those cookies.