Daily Beast – Toxic Asset

Scott Pruitt Says His Lobbyist Landlord’s Clients Didn’t Have Business Before the EPA. They Did.

The EPA chief’s defense of his sweetheart rental is lacking some basic facts.

Sam Stein, Lachlan Markay     April 5, 2018

As he doggedly tries to save his job amid a mounting ethics scandal, Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt has insisted that there was no formal or informal conflict of interest when he rented a room from high-profile Washington D.C lobbyist, J. Steven Hart.

“Mr. Hart,” Pruitt claimed in an recent interview with Fox News on Wednesday, “has no clients who have business before this agency.”

A review of lobbying disclosure forms and publicly-listed EPA records, however, suggests that Pruitt is either lying or is woefully unfamiliar with the operations of his own agency.

Far from being removed from any EPA-related interests, Hart was personally representing a natural gas company, an airline giant, and a major manufacturer that had business before the agency at the time he was also renting out a room to Pruitt. One of his clients is currently battling the EPA in court over an order to pay more than $100 million in environmental cleanup costs.

The New York Times previously reported that Hart’s firm, Williams & Jensen, represented a company that got a pipeline expansion project approved by the EPA. But that only scratches the surface of Hart’s deep involvement in the energy industry—and advocacy on behalf of clients with business before the agency that his one-time tenant leads.

Hart himself was part of a team of four Williams & Jensen lobbyists that has reported lobbying Pruitt’s EPA. They did so on behalf of Owens-Illinois, a glass bottle manufacturer that paid $39 million in 2012 to settle EPA allegations of widespread Clean Air Act violations by a subsidiary. In June 2017, while Pruitt lived at Hart’s DC condo, another of the company’s subsidiaries settled additional EPA allegations that it violated the same law.

“We know that Steven Hart’s firm had clients before the EPA,” said Craig Holman, Government Affairs Lobbyist for the good-government group Public Citizen. “So his insistence that there is no conflict of interest is just off the wall.”

Steven Hart Lobbying Form

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Even clients of Hart’s who didn’t enlist him to lobby the EPA directly had at least tangential business before the agency.

Among them is industrial equipment manufacturer Stanley Black & Decker, which is currently in litigation with the EPA over its own environmental liabilities. In 2014, the EPA ordered the company to pay $104 million in cleanup costs at a super-fund site in Rhode Island. Black & Decker disputed the ruling, but estimated in its most recent annual shareholder report, it expects that it may eventually have to pay between $68 million and $140 million in remediation costs at the site. The case is currently working its way through federal court, an EPA official confirmed to The Daily Beast. And Pruitt himself has directly weighed in on the matter, elevating the super-fund site as a target for immediate and intense attention.

Hart’s other clients include Cheniere Energy, which as Fox’s Ed Henry noted operates liquified natural gas terminals on the Gulf Coast and is reportedly one of the best positioned companies for Pruitt’s American gas export campaign. “Steve has never represented them,” Pruitt insisted to Henry.

In fact, lobbying disclosure records show that Hart has personally represented Cheniere since Williams & Jensen signed the company as a client in 2004.

In a separate interview with The Daily Signal, the news arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation, Pruitt claimed that “[Hart’s] firm represents these [energy industry] clients, not him. There has been no connection whatsoever in that regard.”

In fact, Hart represents numerous firms in the energy space, in addition to Cheniere. Black & Decker subsidiary Stanley Oil and Gas “provides world-class pipeline services and equipment in more than 100 countries, offshore and onshore,” according to its website. Another Hart client, Smithfield Foods, manufactures energy through the use of animal waste collected at its hog production facilities. Hart’s lobbying on behalf of the company routinely includes advocacy on energy policy issues.

Other Hart clients have had business before the EPA on either ceremonial or non-energy related matters. Hart represents the Coca-Cola Company, which has landfill and bottling operations that have fallen under the EPA’s purview. Hart represents United Airlines, which is involved in an aircraft drinking rule program for which the EPA—while Pruitt was staying at Hart’s condo—issued self-inspection requirements. And until December 31 of last year, Hart represented the American Automotive Policy Council, a trade group formed by Chrysler, Ford Motor Company and General Motors; automakers that have numerous policy interests the overlap with the chief environmental protection agency in America.

A request for comment to Hart was not returned seeking clarity as to what, if anything, he did to advance his clients interests before the EPA. In some cases, however, it is clear that his clients fared poorly. This past week, for example, Pruitt announced that he would be rolling back Obama-era car emissions standards, a policy that both Ford and GM have been vocal about not supporting, as one plugged-in Hill source explained.

The EPA did not return a request for comment.

Vanity Fair – U.S.

Can Scott Pruitt Poison the Environment Enough to Save His Job?

Bess Levin, Vanity Fair            April 5, 2018 

The future of Trump’s favorite polluter looks hazy.

The past couple months have been less than ideal for pollution enthusiast Scott Pruitt. At first, headlines about his expensive (taxpayer-funded) travel habit were mostly indistinguishable from similar scandals plaguing other Trump administration Cabinet members. More recently, however, negative stories about the anti-E.P.A. administrator have been tumbling out of his agency on a near daily basis. In the past week alone, we learned that Pruitt was living in a top lobbyist’s D.C. townhouse for just 50 bucks a night—when similar accommodations would have set him back several multiples of that rate—and just happened to approve a deal for one of his landlord’s water-polluting clients to expand a pipeline project after it had the distinction of receiving the second-biggest fine in the history of the Clean Water Act. On Monday, word leaked to The Washington Post that Pruitt’s staff had considered leasing a $100,000-a-month private jet to accommodate his luxe “travel needs”; on Tuesday, sources whispered to The Atlantic that Pruitt had bypassed the White House to give substantial pay raises to two of his closest aides.

Up until recently, it appeared that Pruitt’s job, if not safe, was at least as secure as anyone else’s in an administration in which casual corruption is a venial sin and job security hinges on the whim of a mostly unhinged president. By Wednesday, however, the White House’s stance on the Pruitt Situation seemed to have shifted markedly. For the first time, spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said publicly that “The president’s not” O.K. with the E.P.A. chief‘s actions. She also declined to confirm reports that Trump rang up Pruitt in recent days to offer support. “We’re reviewing the situation. When we have had the chance to have a deeper dive on it we’ll let you know the outcomes of that,” Sanders added. “But we’re currently reviewing that here at the White House.” To those familiar with the roundabout way that Donald Trump slowly exfoliates aides who become irritants, the chilly response looked like a kiss of death.

Perhaps recognizing the gravity of his situation, Pruitt attempted to control the damage Wednesday, with mixed results. “I’m dumbfounded that that’s controversial,” he told the Washington Examiner, referring to his lobbyist-sponsored living situation. Asked by Fox News if the arrangement contradicted Trump’s pledge to “drain the swamp,” Pruitt acted shocked: “I don’t think that that’s even remotely fair to ask that question.” In other interviews, he suggested that the leaks are part of a liberal plot against him, with his enemies willing to “resort to anything” to stop him from deconstructing Obama’s environmental regulatory regime. Speaking to The Washington Times, Pruitt said he was under attack by a “bastion of liberalism,” which apparently forced him to sign a rental agreement that virtually anyone could’ve told him was ethically problematic at best. In Axios, an unnamed Pruitt defender appeared to channel his view of the world, telling the outlet that “this is really about ideology, driven by folks on the left who don’t like” his agenda, and that the bad press is allegedly coming from a recently dismissed political appointee. (That person, when contacted by Politico, denied the accusations and suggested that the E.P.A. is trying to deflect attention by attacking people who have questioned Pruitt’s decisions.)

Over at the White House, Chief of Staff John Kelly is said to be extremely miffed he wasn’t warned in advance that Trump’s E.P.A. head was a ticking time bomb, telling Pruitt in a phone call that “the flow of negative and damning stories needed to stop.” “[It] was not a friendly buck-up call at all,” is how one administration official described the chat to the Daily Beast. Yet for all the major lapses in judgment—practically a job requirement for Trump staffers, given their track record—Pruitt still has one thing going for him: he’s been the most “effective” member of Trump’s Cabinet, which in this case means he’s proven especially adept at gutting the agency he was tasked with running 14 months back. Trump may not appreciate the negative attention Pruitt is getting—and he certainly hates the positive attention, such as a New York Times headline last month, “Scott Pruitt, Trump’s Rule-Cutting E.P.A. Chief, Plots His Political Future”—but he loves what Pruitt has done for his industry pals. “As long as [Trump] feels Pruitt is effective and on his side, he’s probably fine,” one source close to the administration told the Daily Beast.

Pruitt, for his part, made sure to lay things on particularly thick while announcing the rollback of Obama’s car emissions rules this week. “This president has shown tremendous courage to say to the American people that America is going to be put first,” he said at the gathering. With the rollbacks, Pruitt added, “the president is again saying America is going to be put first.” Time will tell whether Pruitt is still around by the time those rules go into effect.

Bloomberg

EPA Chief Denies Knowing Who Raised Aides’ Pay in Heated Fox Interview

By Ari Natter     April 4, 2018

Scott Pruitt. Photographer: T.J. Kirkpatrick/Bloomberg

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt said in a heated interview with Fox News that he doesn’t know who at the agency raised the pay of two aides in defiance of the White House — the latest controversy to engulf him.

Pruitt, in an interview aired Wednesday, said he wasn’t the one who gave the raises and “I don’t know” who did.

“It should not have been done,” Pruitt says. “There will be some accountability”

The Atlantic, citing a source it didn’t identify, reported Tuesday that Pruitt last month used a provision in the Safe Drinking Water Act to boost the salaries of two aides by tens of thousands of dollars after the White House refused to go along with raises he had proposed.

Pruitt has been under fire over revelations that he rented a Capitol Hill condo from the wife of a prominent energy lobbyist whose firm has clients regulated by the EPA. The unconventional lease terms permitted Pruitt to pay $50 only on days his bedroom in the unit was actually occupied — with a total of $6,100 in payments over a roughly six-month period last year.

An EPA ethics adviser said the rental arrangement met federal guidelines and didn’t violate a gift ban.

Pruitt said he didn’t know who authorized the pay raise when pressed by Fox News’ correspondent Ed Henry over whether he would hold accountable the person who authorized the raise.

“You don’t know? You run the agency. You don’t know who did it?” Henry asked. “One of them got a pay raise of, let’s see, $28,000 the other was $56,000. Do you know what the median income in this country is?”

Pruitt said “No.”

“I found out this yesterday and I corrected the action and we are in the process of finding out how it took place and correcting it,” Pruitt responded.

— With assistance by Jennifer A Dlouhy