In a letter sent Monday to House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chair Trey Gowdy (R-SC), House Democrats request Gowdy subpoena Scott Pruitt regarding personal tasks he had an aide perform. These activities appear to have violated the laws that prohibit government officials from receiving favors or taking gifts (or advantage of) subordinates, written to prevent the waste of government officials’ time and taxpayer-derived salary by performing non-work related tasks for their supervisors.
The letter includes a transcript of an interview the Committee conducted with the aide, former Director of Scheduling and Advance, Millan Hupp. According to the transcript, Hupp apparently acted as Pruitt’s personal real estate agent, his family’s travel agent, and most bizarrely, procurer of an old mattress from a Trump hotel.
Why would Pruitt want a used mattress from a hotel? Only Pruitt knows for sure, but we have some ideas.
In the testimony, Hupp says “someone at the Trump Hotel” told Pruitt he could buy a used hotel mattress. We don’t know if Pruitt is in regular talks with hotel management, but we do know he has an in with the hotel’s owner.
It seems safe to assume that after spending the month of August ‘17 on supposedly official EPA business (aka a neat trick to avoid paying rent for the month to his landlord whose husband was lobbying the EPA) by September, Pruitt was probably in desperate need of a good night’s sleep. It doesn’t take much to imagine, then, a certain president selling Pruitt on the idea of the beautiful, clean mattresses found only at Trump Brand Hotels and Influence Peddling Facilities.
Always eager to please Trump, Pruitt perhaps then asked Hupp to check with Trump’s hotel about buying a used mattress. Maybe he chose Hupp for this duty because only three years ago, she worked at an Embassy Suites hotel in Nashville, so she might know how to navigate the murky underworld of used hotel mattress sales. It’s not clear why Pruitt wanted not a new but a used mattress, other than the fact that judging by his EPA agenda, he likes things as dirty as possible. What is clear is that it was not the first time Hupp was charged with appeasing Pruitt’s pricey and perfidious preferences.
Per the House interview transcript, Hupp’s called these personal tasks not work duties, but favors she performed due to her friendship with Pruitt, which developed when she served under him at a PAC and as a campaign aide. Pruitt and the 26-year-old Hupp apparently “worked very closely together and spent a lot of time together,” traveled together, and had dinners together. (Don’t tell Mike Pence! But do tell HuffPo.)
Hupp, per her interview with the House, spent “more than a couple hours a week… over the span of more than 1 month” in the summer of 2017 trying to find Pruitt a place to live. As it turns out, Pruitt was a pretty picky renter, and asked Hupp to again house hunt because he was “not comfortable” in the first apartment she found him in the now-gentrified 13th and U neighborhood. Pruitt’s objection is surprising, given that area is home to his absolute favorite fancy french restaurant, Le Diplomate. Perhaps Hupp was hoping that if he lived nearby, he wouldn’t need to use the lights and sirens on his upgraded bulletproof SUV to get there on time.
Judging by her reward from the federal government, Hupp must have then hit the housing jackpot. She was one of Pruitt’s aides who received a massive pay raise in March (that Pruitt lied to Congress about) despite objections from the White House (though as part of his ongoing scheme to avoid accountability by not writing things down and blame staff for problems, he didn’t officially use one of the $130 fountain pens purchased with taxpayer money to sign for it.) We’re hoping Hupp didn’t blow her bonus all in one go: after press reports of the raise, Pruitt, ever the one to roll things back, rolled them back.
If only she’d gotten him that used hotel mattress, maybe he’d be better rested and might have felt more generous with taxpayer money. After all, Pruitt does say he really cares “so much about taxpayer money.”
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