Everywhere you turn in the Trump administration, another scandal pops up. If it's not an appointed official using government workers for personal errands, it's someone drunkenly harassing coworkers or being accused of stealing over a hundred million dollars from his own business associates or arranging shockingly lax plea deals for billionaire child molesters.
It's been the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency that have been the most popular grift magnets—which is to be expected, given the power those administrators hold over regulations that can make or cost fossil fuel industries billions with the stroke of a pen.
And now there's another one, as the House Energy and Commerce Committee launches a new probe into whether two ex-utility company lobbyists now in top EPA roles violated ethics rules in their aggressive push to roll back pollution regulations—a move that coincided with the needs of their most recent clients.
The committee's Democrats are seeking to probe communications between the utilities and an industry group that was run from the offices of the lobbying firm Hunton Andrews Kurth, which had employed Bill Wehrum, EPA's air chief, and David Harlow, the EPA air office's senior counsel.
Wehrum continued to craft policy goals for the industry group even while under consideration for his EPA post; Politico reports that among the questions lawmakers are probing is whether he and Harlow were involved in the crafting of a EPA policy memo only months afterward that benefited one of those former clients.
It never ends. Team Trump appointed nominees with the apparent belief that a Republican-held Congress would always be around to stonewall investigations into just how they got there and what they were doing; they genuinely appear to have been unconcerned with the possibility of future investigations. Whether that was hubris or merely stupidity is unclear.