EPA emails show effort to shield Pruitt
WASHINGTON — It was supposed to be a town hall meeting where Iowa ranchers could ask questions directly of Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. But when the agency learned that anyone would be free to ask something, they decided to script the questions themselves.
“My sincere apologies,” an EPA official wrote to the rancher who would be moderating the event. “We cannot do open q&a from the crowd.” She then proposed several simple questions for him to ask Pruitt, including: “What has it been like to work with President Trump?”
Details about the December event, and dozens of other official appearances from Pruitt’s scandal-plagued first year at the EPA, have until now been hidden from public view as a result of an extraordinary effort by Pruitt and his staff to maintain strict secrecy about the bulk of his daily schedule.
But a new cache of emails covering most of Pruitt’s first year at the EPA offer a detailed look inside the agency’s aggressive efforts to conceal his activities as a public servant. The more than 10,000 documents, made public as part of a Freedom of Information lawsuit by the Sierra Club, show that the agency’s close control of Pruitt’s events is driven more by a desire to avoid tough questions from the public than by concerns about security, contradicting Pruitt’s long-standing defense of his secretiveness.
Time and again, the files show, decisions turn on limiting advance public knowledge of Pruitt’s appearances to control the message. The emails, many of which are communications with Pruitt’s schedulers, show an agency that divides people into “friendly and “unfriendly” camps and that, on one occasion — involving a secret visit to a Toyota plant last year — became so focused on not disclosing information that Pruitt’s corporate hosts expressed confusion about the trip.
“The security aspect is smoke and mirrors,” said Kevin Chmielewski, Pruitt’s former deputy chief of staff for operations, who is one of several former EPA officials who have said that they were fired or sidelined for disagreeing with Pruitt’s management practices.
“He didn’t want anybody to question anything,” Chmielewski said, adding that Pruitt “just doesn’t understand what it’s like to be a public figure.”
Pruitt testified before Congress last month that Chmielewski had resigned.
All politicians employ staffs whose job is to control the environments in which they appear. Pruitt, though, has carried the practice to an extreme.
He does not release a list of public speaking events and he discloses most official trips only after they are over.
Pruitt doesn’t hold news conferences, and in one episode, journalists who learned of an event were ejected from the premises after an EPA official threatened to call the police.
The agency moved to require that any documents related to Pruitt that are gathered as a result of Freedom of Information requests be provided to his political aides 48 hours in advance for an “awareness review” before they are made public, “to insure that leadership is aware of public disclosures,” a June email said.