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White House Aides Are Urging Trump to Fire Scott Pruitt, the EPA Chief

WASHINGTON — Senior White House staff members are encouraging President Donald Trump to fire Scott Pruitt, his embattled Environmental Protection Agency chief, according to two top administration officials. While Trump has until now championed Pruitt, the officials say the president’s enthusiasm may be cooling because of the ongoing cascade of alleged ethical and legal missteps.

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White House Aides Are Urging Trump to Fire Scott Pruitt, the EPA Chief
By
CORAL DAVENPORT
and
MAGGIE HABERMAN, New York Times

WASHINGTON — Senior White House staff members are encouraging President Donald Trump to fire Scott Pruitt, his embattled Environmental Protection Agency chief, according to two top administration officials. While Trump has until now championed Pruitt, the officials say the president’s enthusiasm may be cooling because of the ongoing cascade of alleged ethical and legal missteps.

Over the past few months, as Pruitt’s problems have mounted — he is now the subject of at least 11 federal investigations and some Republicans have called for his resignation — Trump has continued to support his EPA chief on Twitter and in public and private remarks.

But that is likely to change in the coming weeks, the two officials said.

Since the April confirmation of Pruitt’s deputy, the former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, White House staff members say they believe that if Pruitt is fired or resigns, Wheeler will continue to effectively push through Trump’s agenda to help the coal industry and roll back environmental regulations.

Some Republicans have said that Wheeler, a former Capitol Hill and EPA staff member — known as a low-key but highly experienced Washington insider — would quite likely be as effective, and possibly more so, than Pruitt at undoing regulations, without drawing the embarrassing headlines of his boss.

At the White House on Monday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the press secretary, expressed confidence in Wheeler but declined to say whether Trump intended to fire Pruitt in the near future.

“I don’t have any personnel announcements on that front,” Sanders said. “Certainly we have confidence in the No. 2, otherwise the president wouldn’t have asked him to serve at such a senior level position within the EPA.”

Meanwhile, as the negative media reports about Pruitt continue, Trump is now likely to pay more attention, the officials said.

One official said there was recognition now that Pruitt’s problems were “a bottomless pit.” But the White House doesn’t know how much more there is or what direction it could take.

Newly revealed emails detail how Pruitt operated the agency in unprecedented secrecy.

Privately, even many in Pruitt’s inner circle at the EPA have expressed frustration with their boss’s actions.

In the past month, at least five of his senior staff members have resigned, including Samantha Dravis, his senior policy adviser; Pasquale Perrotta, his chief of security; Albert Kelly, a business associate from Pruitt’s home state of Oklahoma whom Pruitt had appointed to a top policy position at the EPA; Liz Bowman, his communications director; and John Konkus, a senior press office official. As many as a dozen more senior political staff members are said to be considering resigning, according to three current and one former staffer. Pruitt’s actions have tried the patience of even his staunch supporters, including some Republicans.

“Republicans like what he’s done, but they don’t like how he’s done it,” said John Feehery, a Republican strategist who worked for the former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and the former Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas. “He has made some major mistakes and doesn’t seem to care that much about them. They have a lot of tolerance, but it has its limits.”

Other administration officials have resigned over similar ethics and spending controversies.

Tom Price, the former secretary of health and human services, was forced to resign in 2017 after racking up nearly $400,000 in travel bills for chartered flights. Trump fired David Shulkin, the Veterans Affairs secretary, after an inspector general’s report concluded that he had spent too much time sightseeing on official trips and had improperly accepted Wimbledon tickets as a gift.

Some of the 11 federal investigations into Pruitt’s behavior span a far wider range of ethics questions. The House Oversight Committee, led by Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., has opened an inquiry into Pruitt’s actions at the EPA, the first Republican-led investigation of a Trump administration Cabinet member. On Wednesday, Gowdy’s staff began conducting transcribed, closed-door interviews with Pruitt’s closest aides.

A government watchdog office has concluded that Pruitt broke the law with the $43,000 installation of a secure telephone booth. He remains under investigation for several ethics concerns, including his condominium-rental agreement with the wife of an energy lobbyist, and the accusations that he demoted or sidelined EPA employees who questioned his spending. He has been criticized for lavish expenditures on foreign travel, including a trip to Morocco — a country where the EPA has no policy agenda — that was arranged by a lobbyist. His domestic travel also came under scrutiny after a former Pruitt staff member told Congressional investigators that Pruitt often sought to justify travel home to Oklahoma, directing his employees to “find me something to do” there.

Still, Pruitt’s supporters, including some of Trump’s most prominent friends in the coal and oil industries, note that the EPA administrator, perhaps more than any Cabinet member, has pushed through a policy agenda that allows Trump to claim that he is fulfilling a core campaign promise: stripping away regulations that he says stymie the growth of the U.S. economy.

Some of those rollbacks have come at the direct request of Robert E. Murray, the chief executive of Murray Energy, one of the nation’s largest coal producers, who is a longtime Trump supporter and donated $300,000 to the president’s inauguration.

“Administrator Pruitt has been the star of the Trump administration,” Murray said in a statement. “He is taking the actions necessary to reverse the illegal and destructive regulations of the Obama administration.” Harold Hamm, the chief executive of Continental Resources, an Oklahoma-based oil and gas company, who has advised Trump and championed Pruitt, has told people close to the White House that he continues to support the EPA leader.

During an April 26 appearance before a Congressional committee, at which Pruitt had been expected to come under fire for his alleged ethical lapses, conservative Republicans from farm and rust belt states lavishly praised Pruitt for his policy work.

Rep. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., who advised the Trump campaign and is running for Senate, told Pruitt, “I think the greatest sin that you’ve committed, if any, is that you have actually done what Trump ran on, what he won on, and what he has commissioned you to do in finding some balance in both carrying out the mission of environmental protection, while at the same time looking over economy and jobs creation.”

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