Chief of staff advised resistant president to fire EPA head
John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, told President Donald Trump last week that Scott Pruitt, the embattled administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, needed to go in the wake of damaging allegations about ethical infractions and spending irregularities, according to two officials briefed about the conversation.
But Trump, who is personally fond of Pruitt and sees him as a crucial ally in his effort to roll back environmental rules, has resisted firing him.
White House officials said Friday that Trump continues to believe that Pruitt has been effective in his role.
“No one other than the president has the authority to hire and fire,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, told reporters. “The president feels that the administrator has done a good job at EPA.”
She said the White House is “continuing to review” Pruitt’s conduct.
Pruitt has been dogged by a series of scandals in recent weeks, including revelations that he rented a condominium co-owned by the wife of an energy lobbyist for $50 per night; that he spent more than $100,000 on taxpayer-funded first-class travel, which the EPA has argued was necessary because of security concerns; and that the agency sidelined or demoted at least five high-ranking agency employees who had raised questions about his spending.
The Wall Street Journal first reported on Kelly’s unheeded advice to Trump, which marked the escalation of a quiet but intense turn in the West Wing against Pruitt. Privately, many senior White House aides have become infuriated with the EPA chief and exasperated with his ethical lapses, believing that it is only a matter of time before his special standing with the president wears thin.
On Friday, Politico reported that the lobbyists who owned the condominium Pruitt paid $50 a month to rent had leased the space to him for only six weeks, and became frustrated when he declined for months to leave, eventually pushing him out and changing the locks.
In an interview with Fox News, Pruitt described his living arrangement as an “Airbnb situation,” and said EPA’s ethics office had signed off on it.
The ethics office ruled that Pruitt’s condo rental did not violate the agency’s rules. A later memo released this week said the office did not have all the facts about the rental when it made its initial ruling, including reports that Pruitt’s daughter, McKenna Pruitt, lived at the apartment when she was a White House intern.