If it seems impossible to go ten minutes without a story about Scott Pruitt and corruption, that’s because it seems impossible for Scott Pruitt to go more than ten minutes without holding out his hand to a lobbyist.
A Washington consultant and onetime lobbyist for foreign governments played a central role in attempting to set up a trip to Australia by Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, while the consultant took steps to disguise his role, new documents released this week show.
This comes just one day after it was made clear that Scott Pruitt’s mystery trip to Morocco, whose purpose and schedule has still not been made clear by the EPA, was also funded by a lobbyist.
Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, allowed a lobbyist friend to play an unusually influential role in setting his agenda during a visit in December to Morocco, according to internal communications related to the scheduling of meetings reviewed by The New York Times.
The lobbyist who delivered up Pruitt in Morocco, having demonstrated his tight connections to the Trump regime, was rewarded by a contract as a foreign agent for the Moroccan government a few weeks later.
Unlike the Morocco trip, the Australian trip fell through. Possibly because the lobbyist behind the trip, Matthew Freedman, is an associate of Paul Manafort who worked with Manafort at what has been cheerily dubbed “the torturer’s lobby.” And Manafort has been rather busy for the last few months.
But there is a connecting peg between the Australian trip that goes beyond just the fact that the EPA administrator had absolutely no reason to go to either place.
Mr. Freedman used an email address similar to the one he used during the presidential transition to coordinate the Australia trip with E.P.A. officials and another lobbyist, Richard Smotkin, who has longstanding ties to Mr. Pruitt. Mr. Smotkin also helped organize a different foreign trip taken by Mr. Pruitt — to Morocco in December — and then four months later signed a $40,000-a-month contract to represent an arm of the government of that North African country.
So one lobbyist was actually using another lobbyist to arrange trips for Scott Pruitt. From there the email chain went to a name that’s becoming familiar in Pruitt stories—Millan Hupp.
Hupp was one of the two aides for whom Pruitt snared “raises” by taking money from a fund meant for environmental consultants. Hupp—who was the assistant manager of an Embassy Suites before going to work for Pruitt—is not exactly an environmental expert. Hupp is also the aide who spent her work hours shopping for a new place for Pruitt to live after the lobbyist who was providing him a discount townhouse got tired of his extended guest.
Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, said in a statement, “It’s no wonder these emails had to be forced out by a court: They expose the fact that corporate lobbyists are orchestrating Pruitt’s taxpayer-funded trips to push their dangerous agendas.”
Which isn’t completely accurate. Lobbyists are controlling a lot more than just Pruitt’s travels.