The continued presence of Scott Pruitt as administrator of the EPA is the clearest sign that the rule of law and principles of common decency have been suspended. Pruitt has been proudly front and center for a greatest hits of scandal:
Pay for play from lobbyists? Of course.
Patronage for his friends? Big time.
Lying to Congress? Constantly.
Living the high life on the taxpayer dime? Like no one before.
But as much as Scott Pruitt has made himself the poster child for Corrupt and Proud, he’s not stopped there. Because Pruitt is showing corporate utility executives the way to be more corrupt.
Mr. Pruitt had spent the previous six years as Oklahoma’s attorney general attacking E.P.A. regulations in court, often in coordination with energy giants. Now he ran the agency, and at the closed-door breakfast he laid out his vision for the gathered executives.
“Whoever said you can’t have your cake and eat it too, doesn’t know what to do with cake,” Mr. Pruitt told the room, according to a speech prepared for the March 2017 event.
Pruitt made it clear to the executives that he was on their side, not that of their customers—otherwise known as the great majority of Americans. And that he would knock down rules that protect the environment to the benefit of fossil fuel companies utilities.
This breakfast of greed was just one of more than 10,000 documents turned up in a Freedom of Information request by the Sierra Club after they took the EPA to court back in September for hiding Pruitt’s schedule and meeting information that’s supposed to be public. As the public has the chance to scour these documents, expect more information on what’s really been going on at Pruitt’s EPA to surface.
Don’t expect any of it to be good.
She Watts Spooner put together a terrific compilation of Pruitt corruption over the weekend. Read it, link it, refer to it.