The Best People

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The Best People Page 18

by Alexander Nazaryan


  The scandals over private flights broke throughout the fall of 2017, just as Kelly and Porter were laboring to get the West Wing in order. It fell to Kelly to play bad cop with the cabinet, too. On September 29, 2017, the same day that Tom Price resigned, a memorandum from the White House said that “all travel on Government-owned, rented, leased, or chartered aircraft…shall require prior approval” from Kelly.

  McGinley also toughened his approach, though what that really meant was that he had to simplify it. He was accustomed to working with corporate executives; now he was working with children. “I can’t babysit the cabinet,” he would complain. But that was exactly what he was being asked to do. That winter, he drafted a memorandum titled “Creating a Culture of Compliance” that was shared with the most troublesome of the cabinet members, including Zinke and Pruitt. Its main points were astonishingly basic but inarguably necessary:

  You are the best guardian of your reputation.

  Work closely with your ethics officer.

  Be critical of your schedule.

  Remember, an ethics opinion matters only if the ethics officer reviewed all of the information.

  Even if legal, that does not mean you should do it.

  By spring, this became a speech, which McGinley would give to different agencies, traveling like Paul the Apostle across the federal bureaucracy, preaching the gospel of compliance. If the messages in McGinley’s speech were heartening—here was somebody in the Trump administration who clearly cared about doing right—it was disheartening that the points in the speech had to be made in the first place, especially this late in a presidential term:

  “We work for the American people.…Be good stewards of taxpayers’ money.” What business did anyone who didn’t already know as much have working in the federal government?

  In his speech, McGinley touched at length on the plight of David H. Safavian, an official in the George W. Bush administration who was sent to prison for lying about his association with lobbyist Jack Abramoff (a frequent visitor to Abramoff’s eatery Signatures, Safavian was trying to help Abramoff buy two government properties, one of which was the Old Post Office, which would in time become the Trump International Hotel).

  The pressure from Kelly and McGinley, not to mention the unrelenting media coverage, did help. It scared Ben Carson and Steve Mnuchin straight (at least for a little while: in January 2019, the New York Times reported that Mnuchin had flown to California on the private plane of disgraced banker Michael R. Milken, who had long sought a presidential pardon for his financial crimes). Rick Perry, too. And some never caused any trouble to begin with. But there were a few cabinet members, McGinley knew, who were beyond redemption. They were the ones who were desperate to impress Trump, and also to emulate him. They were the ones who would not listen to anyone else. They would bring down the whole teetering edifice. And they would call it victory.

  Chapter 11

  The Possum

  Scott Pruitt’s career as a federal public servant ended on the afternoon of July 5, 2018. On that day, three officials from the EPA inspector general’s office were meeting with this author. The meeting itself was off the record. It lasted about an hour. As the three officials were leaving the Yahoo News newsroom, less than a block from the White House, one of the officials looked up at a flat-screen television in the front lobby, which was tuned to CNN.

  “Oh my God,” she cried.

  Everyone looked up. Though the television was silent, the chyron at the bottom of the screen said that Trump had finally cut Pruitt loose.

  Notably, none of the EPA officials seemed especially bothered. They were far too professional to show joy, but their lack of disappointment or surprise would have been difficult to miss. There was little mystery, after all, about what career EPA officials thought of the man who did his best to destroy the agency where they worked.

  Two things were surprising about the Pruitt firing. The first was how long it took, and how resistant Trump had been to letting the guillotine fall on the chubby Oklahoman’s neck. Just a month before—when many, though not all, of Pruitt’s ethical shortcomings had been uncovered—Trump praised Pruitt at a Federal Emergency Management Agency meeting where both men were present. “EPA is doing really, really well,” Trump said, in one of his shows of awkward and edgy praise. “Somebody has to say that about you a little bit, you know that, Scott.” Before that, he had called Pruitt the victim of media bias and zeal.

  That was thin cover. Trump’s own chief of staff had concluded that Pruitt was an irredeemable pestilence on the Trump administration, one that had to be extirpated as quickly as possible. It took him several months, but in early July 2018, John Kelly succeeded, helped along by tweets from Fox News primetime host Laura Ingraham and the complaints of other conservatives grown exhausted by the damage Pruitt managed to daily inflict on their cause. No number of vanquished Obama regulations was worth quite this much trouble.

  The second notable aspect of Pruitt’s demise was just how much harm he did manage to inflict on the nation’s environmental policy, even as it became clear that he was on his way out. On his final day in office, Pruitt removed the cap on the number of glider trucks that could be manufactured in the United States. Because they used antiquated engines, gliders released a far greater number of pollutants than newer, more efficient trucks. There was no reason to grant this exemption, except that the glider lobby wanted it. And as had been the case for decades, Scott Pruitt gladly did what an industry lobby asked of him. He had no reason to deviate from that practice, which had served him remarkably well.

  Short and stolid, Pruitt carried himself with a rancher’s confidence. His white hair was closely cropped, and though he wore glasses, there was nothing scholarly or bureaucratic about Edward Scott Pruitt. At forty-eight, he was the second-youngest member of Trump’s original cabinet (Nikki Haley was his junior by four years) and frequently wore a boyish smile that made him look even younger.

  Pruitt grew up in Lexington, Kentucky. His father ran restaurants, while his mother stayed home, tending to the three Pruitt children. On the strength of his skill as a baseball player, Pruitt entered the University of Kentucky in 1986. “The Possum,” as he was known, did not distinguish himself as a ballplayer. In 1987, he transferred from Kentucky to Georgetown College, a small Baptist school outside of Lexington. He continued to play baseball, eventually earning a tryout with the Cincinnati Reds. But once it became clear that a career in the major leagues was unlikely, Pruitt turned to law, entering the University of Tulsa’s law school in 1990. He would stay in Oklahoma for the next two-and-a-half decades.

  After graduating from law school in 1993, Pruitt started Christian Legal Services, Inc., a law practice that represented clients seeking religious liberty protections under the First Amendment. Among these was a state employee who had supposedly been prevented from holding a Bible study group in her home. Subsequent reporting found that, in fact, Pruitt’s client “had been instructed to avoid proselytizing to agency clients.” The case demonstrated Pruitt’s conviction that Christianity had been pushed out of the public square, a belief that would bring him into alignment with the culture warriors then ascendant in the Republican Party.

  Pruitt’s political career began in 1998, when he successfully challenged a sixteen-year incumbent for his seat on the Oklahoma State Senate. Although he’d never run for office, Pruitt announced his arrival in electoral politics with breathtaking confidence: “This race has little to do with Ged Wright,” he said of his opponent as the primary neared. “He simply holds the seat I’m seeking.” Pruitt won.

  Pruitt was not interested in the backbencher’s sleepy, comfortable existence. He was elected the Republican whip in 2001 and the assistant Republican floor leader in 2003, giving him increasing prominence within a Republican caucus whose clout was growing in Oklahoma. His religious conservatism earned him the nickname “Pastor Pruitt” from the Tulsa World. He tried to curb the teaching of evolution in public schools and proposed a
restrictive new abortion measure. Both measures failed. Aside from those efforts, Pruitt could boast few legislative accomplishments. Accomplishment on behalf of the people of Oklahoma was not what he was after.

  In 2007, Pruitt left the State Senate for the RedHawks, a minor league baseball team in Oklahoma City, of which he had purchased a share four years before. When he decided to run for the attorney general’s office three years after that, he did so with a new strategy. Rigidity and recalcitrance became his main selling point. Oklahoma would be as stubborn as Scott Pruitt, who, if he were elected as attorney general, would no longer have forty-seven other state senators to contend with. As the state’s top law enforcement officer, he would have complete control over how to focus the energies of a staff of about 150.

  Pruitt was not going to prosecute wrongdoers within Oklahoma, but rather those he saw as threatening the state’s sovereignty. This was in keeping with the rise of the Tea Party movement, which saw in President Obama the first signs of incipient socialism. Pruitt’s job, accordingly, was to be less law enforcement than constitutional defense. “As attorney general,” Pruitt pledged in a 2010 campaign advertisement, “day one, I would file a lawsuit against President Obama to stop the application of healthcare in the state of Oklahoma,” a reference to the Affordable Care Act. In a refrain similar to the one he would strike some seven years later, he vowed to institute an “office of federalism,” whose staff lawyers would “wake up each day, and go to bed each night, thinking about the ways they can push back against Washington.”

  For that election, he took a $5,000 contribution from Koch Industries, whose owners, the brothers Koch, were busy funding candidates and causes that would resist Obama’s vision of a more expansive federal government. Other contributors included Bank of America, Chevron, and the National Rifle Association, but it was the Koch contribution that provided the clearest evidence of a marriage between Pruitt’s longstanding conservative convictions and a reinvigorated national movement of anti-government activism couched in the language of individual liberty, free markets and states’ rights.

  “It was a perfect timing of his personal philosophy matching up with what the people of Oklahoma wanted,” explained former Pruitt campaign adviser Tyler Laughlin many years later.

  One of Pruitt’s first steps as attorney general was to file suit against Kathleen Sebelius, the Health and Human Services chief, in an attempt to stop the federal government from giving tax credits for health insurance. He also shuttered his office’s Environmental Protection Unit and, as promised, opened a new branch of the attorney general’s office, the Federalism Unit, whose mission was to fend off the federal government as if it were a criminal gang creeping across the borders of Oklahoma.

  Since 2005, the Oklahoma attorney general’s office had been working on a lawsuit against Arkansas-based poultry producers who, he alleged, had polluted the Illinois River. Pruitt had taken $40,000 from poultry executives during his run for that office. Pruitt halted the lawsuit. In this, and other actions Pruitt took, it was impossible to tell where his own convictions ended and the concerns of donors began. Like the very craftiest politicians, he made the two indistinguishable.

  Pruitt also began to shift his attention away from the Affordable Care Act to the EPA, which he sued fourteen times during his nearly two terms in office, often in concert with other attorneys general—but also with the participation of energy companies that had been among his most loyal supporters. In some instances, the New York Times found, Pruitt simply cut-and-pasted language sent him by energy companies into correspondences with the EPA.

  In 2012, Pruitt was elected the head of the Republican Attorneys General Association, or RAGA, which coordinated anti-Obama legal actions on a variety of fronts. RAGA’s creed was best summarized by Texas attorney general Greg Abbott, who filed forty-four suits against the Obama administration before becoming that state’s governor: “I go into the office, I sue the federal government and I go home.” RAGA, to which Abbott belonged with twenty-six other attorneys general around the nation, received $353,250 from Koch Industries during the 2016 election cycle.

  In early 2013, Pruitt convened a Summit on Federalism and the Future of Fossil Fuels, held in Oklahoma City. The sponsoring institution was the Law and Economics Center at the George Mason University School of Law, which had deep ties to the Koch network. Among the speakers were William F. Whitsitt, a vice president at Devon Energy who had drafted the language Pruitt later sent to the EPA, and Harold G. Hamm, an Oklahoma-based energy executive who was crucial to Pruitt’s political rise (and who later became a close adviser of President Trump). There were also lawyers who worked for firms involved in Pruitt’s lawsuits against the EPA.

  “These days, whenever states go to court against the Obama administration, the chances are that Pruitt is somehow involved,” Governing magazine said in a 2015 profile of Pruitt.

  Pruitt was not up for reelection in 2016, but his path forward seemed fairly clear. The governorship would be open in 2018, while senior Senator Inhofe, in his eighties, would likely retire in the next several years. Pruitt could do in Oklahoma City what Abbott had done in 2014 in Austin.

  Then came November 8, 2016.

  Nobody expected that President Trump would be a friend to the environment, given just how shamelessly—and dishonestly—he had pandered to the coal industry during his presidential campaign, all but promising to restore the halcyon days of 1920. But the president-elect loved to draw an audience with the possibility of surprise. On December 5, Trump met with Al Gore, the former vice president and environmental activist, in Trump Tower. On his way out, Gore told reporters the meeting was “a sincere search for areas of common ground.”

  That was a clever feint. Two days later, Pruitt walked through the same lobby. “Pruitt was a guy we had targeted for a long time,” Bannon said later. The energy guys liked him; so did McGahn, a quiet but insistent adherent to conservative ideology.

  Where Bannon saw an able soldier in his war on the administrative state, employees at EPA saw a smirking destroyer of everything they had been working to accomplish. “We were terrified when Scott Pruitt was nominated,” an EPA employee later recalled to New York magazine. “He seemed to be somebody who understood the legal underpinnings of our work and the ways to legally unbind it. He’s competent in the wrong ways.”

  That would prove an accurate assessment, but only to a point. Pruitt would not turn out to be quite as competent as he once seemed. And he was more dishonest and deranged than anyone could imagine, so that when it came time to pack up his things in July 2018, he managed to make Tom Price’s grotesque abuse of government services seem like the theft of a pencil sharpener. But that was more than a year away, and the moment when Pruitt would become the butt of jokes on late-night television seemed unimaginable.

  Democrats vociferously opposed Pruitt’s nomination, but they were powerless to stop it; Rob Porter had done his due diligence in taking Pruitt around the Hill, making sure that nobody in the Republican conference suddenly developed an independent spirit. None would.

  Pruitt greeted his new employees on February 21, 2017, at an address at EPA headquarters just down the block from the White House. “I believe that we as an agency, and we as a nation, can be both pro-energy and jobs and pro-environment,” Pruitt said. “But we don’t have to choose between the two.” He then added a sentiment that was jarring for someone who was to lead an agency tasked with protecting the environment against humanity’s encroachments: “I don’t believe,” Pruitt said, “we can be better as a country.”

  The very notion of environmentalism, with its language of remediation and redemption, presumed the exact opposite. Pruitt’s religious faith—he was a Southern Baptist, a deacon at his suburban Tulsa church—explained this unfounded optimism regarding the effects of human activity on the natural world. A feature of Pruitt’s faith was premillennialism, a conviction that the return of Jesus Christ was imminent. If that was the case, worrying about sea level
s and ozone layers was pointless. In this way, Pruitt harkened back to James G. Watt, the Reagan-era interior secretary who once answered a question about the custodianship of the nation’s natural resources by telling a congressional committee, “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.”

  No federal department suffered as much under Trump as EPA. A climate scientist who came to EPA in September 2016 was thrilled to be working on the vanguard of her field. “It felt really amazing,” she remembered more than two years later. Recent achievements included the Paris accords and the Clean Power Plan, on which President Hillary Clinton was expected to build. The transition documents were written with her in mind. But these had to be rewritten, and simplified, come November 9.

  The transition was slow and ominous. The most trenchant impression for the climate scientist was of Myron Ebell, the global warming denier, lurking in the halls. Once, as she came off an elevator, Ebell waved at her. “It was creepy,” she recalled. How did he know who she was? And if he did know, was it because she worked on climate change? Unfamiliar faces were greeted at the Pennsylvania Avenue headquarters with suspicious glances from career staffers. The strangers could have been colleagues from another part of the building, but many feared that the new administration was sending in political operatives to root out opposition to its pro-energy agenda.

  There was good reason to worry about Scott Pruitt and the people he was bringing with him. The new administrator’s chief of staff would be Ryan Jackson, who had been chief of staff to Senator Inhofe, who brought a snowball to the Senate floor in 2015 to show that global warming was not taking place. In time, several other Inhofe alumni would come to fill out Pruitt’s team, even as Inhofe himself gradually lost faith in his fellow Oklahoman.

 

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