The Best People

by Alexander Nazaryan

  The Pruitts subsequently moved to Eastern Market, near Capitol Hill. They did so by enlisting Hupp’s help as their real estate agent. As she later admitted, she conducted this search while ostensibly working for the EPA, meaning that the American taxpayer was subsidizing Pruitt’s journey through the intricacies of the district’s real estate market. Using a federal employee to conduct personal business was grossly illegal, a perfect example of the government corruption Trump had promised to eradicate.

  That fall, Pruitt also dispatched Hupp to purchase a used mattress from the Trump International Hotel. The request was almost too bizarre for mockery. And though mockery did pour down on Pruitt yet again, the yearning remained unrealized: the hotel did not sell mattresses. Even great men sometimes had to settle for soiled bedding that was not the soiled bedding they had hoped for.

  Much about Pruitt’s strange and scandalous tenure at the EPA would not be known until the spring and summer of 2018, when every day seemed to bring news of a new scandal for Pruitt. For just about all of 2017, he had been a man on the ascent. The Los Angeles Times deemed him Trump’s “most adept and dangerous hatchet man” in the summer of 2017, a month after the Paris withdrawal, when Pruitt’s stock was as high as it would ever be. Even Pruitt’s most vociferous critics were awed by his regulatory rollback. One senior official at the Environmental Defense Fund worried that he could become a mainstay of American political life—a U.S. senator, perhaps even president. Pruitt did visit Iowa that December.

  In early January 2018—now just a few months before the tsunami of scandal would come crashing down on the pudgy, self-satisfied mandarin—the EPA published a list of sixty-seven environmental safeguards Pruitt had either fully rolled back or was in the process of undoing. These included ​the ​2015 Waters of the United States rule and the Clean Power Plan, which established nationwide carbon emissions standards for power plants. Here was the regulatory equivalent of the German blitzkrieg across Poland: so extensive, and effective, that no front was safe. An Obama administration rule had curbed power plant emissions of mercury and arsenic, among the most destructive elements to human health. Despite scientific consensus about how harmful those emissions were, Pruitt ordered the rule under “review,” thus indicating his intention to weaken it.

  Pruitt could do little about the nation’s environmental laws, but he had great say in how and when those laws were applied, if they were going to be applied at all. Using the complexity (and obscurity) of the federal rule-making process, Pruitt proposed to either overturn or arrest the implementation of Obama-era rules with remarkable efficiency. In April 2017, for example, he wrote a letter to energy executives announcing an administrative stay on a rule regarding air pollution by energy producers. He made other such decisions regarding rules about toxic wastewater effluents from energy plants, as well as a program designed to address chemical accidents and air quality standards for ground-level ozone, or smog.

  Betsy Southerland, who spent thirty years as a scientist at the EPA but chose to retire shortly after Pruitt’s arrival, was confident the courts would ultimately prevent Pruitt from entirely undoing Obama’s legacy, just as the courts had almost entirely halted Pruitt’s assault on Obama’s regulations from Oklahoma. However, she also figured that given all the forthcoming legal challenges, plus the motions and countermotions they would involve, the nation would not return to the environmental regulatory structure that was in place when Obama left office until 2028.

  Even with all the enemies Pruitt was making on the left, the man who eventually brought Pruitt down was not a rogue environmentalist or a creature of the Deep State lodged within the EPA. It was, instead, a young Trump political appointee named Kevin Chmielewski, a clean-cut Republican who became the unlikely hero of the environmental movement.

  The nation first heard Chmielewski’s name in April 2016, when then candidate Trump held a rally at Stephen Decatur High School in Berlin, a small coastal town in Maryland. In the midst of the speech, Trump wondered, “Where the hell is Kevin? Get him out here,” Trump commanded. Chmielewski promptly took the stage.

  Chmielewski was not one of those functionaries who had always lusted for a proximity to power. He was a lackadaisical student in his youth. “I was one of those knucklehead kids growing up who got straight C’s and D’s,” he would remember in an interview with the Dispatch, a local newspaper. “I was on welfare, I never went to college and I should have been one of those kids that ends up in jail or doing dishes somewhere.” He took up surfing, and after high school, went into the Coast Guard. In 2003, however, he got a taste of politics when he was given the chance to do advance work—the work done in advance of a dignitary’s arrival at a given location—for Vice President Dick Cheney.

  Coming into Washington often led to delusions of grandeur, but there was no sense that Chmielewski succumbed to that temptation. “I attribute my success to the people in our school system and our community who raised me,” he told the Dispatch after his appearance on stage with Trump. Even in the midst of a presidential season marked by daily shows of grandiosity and indecency (and by no means only from Trump), Chmielewski maintained his plain, dignified composure. Later, pro-Pruitt propagandists in the conservative press would labor mightily to call his dignity into question. They would find laughably little success.

  In February 2018, Vice President Mike Pence went to Asia, and Chmielewski went with him. When he returned stateside, he was told he no longer had a job at the EPA. The dismissal was not made public until April, when the New York Times reported that Chmielewski was one of five high-ranking EPA officials pushed out of the agency for trying to restrain Pruitt in his imitation of a mogul’s lifestyle. They included Eric Weese, the security official who spoke out against Pruitt’s use of car sirens and lights, only to have Nino Perrotta gladly take his place.

  Of the five, Chmielewski was the only political appointee, a Trump loyalist, who could not be dismissed as a disgruntled career staffer. Pruitt failed to understand this, to grasp that he was making an enemy who was determined to seek out revenge.

  That would not prove especially difficult, given the intensifying focus on Pruitt. Chmielewski went to House Democrats, finding a receptive audience in Representative Cummings, the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee. A week after the Times published its report on Chmielewski’s dismissal, Cummings and other Democrats sent a letter to Pruitt. It was clear that Chmielewski told them about everything: the insane security measures, the use of Millan Hupp as a taxpayer-funded real estate agent, improper raises to favored deputies. He even told the legislators that Pruitt demanded his flights be booked with Delta so that he could earn points from his airline of choice.

  Finally, the letter said that Chmielewski and others were either fired or otherwise marginalized for trying to check Pruitt’s deepening megalomania. In Chmielewski’s case, there was a threatening call with Perrotta, who said he “didn’t give a fuck” about who may have been listening in.

  Pruitt was clearly afraid of Chmielewski, dispatching his press secretary, Wilcox, to place damaging news items in conservative publications like the Washington Free Beacon and the Daily Caller. Chmielewski’s agenda was not anti-Trump, it was pro-decency. Some Trump loyalists did scoff at the favorable media depictions of Chmielewski, pointing to what they saw as self-aggrandizing behavior. There were rumors that he was staying with Corey Lewandowski, the former Trump campaign manager who was running a consultancy out of a bright and roomy Capitol Hill house. Nobody ever explained what the Chmielewski-Lewandowski connection meant, how deep it was, why it was relevant in this city of complexly intertwined connections. The point was to damage Chmielewski, to blunt his claims through insinuation.

  This campaign did not work. The media in Washington may have been a little too adept at turning a hangnail into a scandal, yet in the case of Pruitt, the alarm was commensurate with the administrator’s behavior. And the alarm only got louder as some of Pruitt’s top aides turned against him, resigning
their EPA positions while also offering damning testimony about what those positions had entailed. Dravis testified before a House committee in late June about how Pruitt had her embark on the wildly unethical enterprise of helping his wife find a job with the Republican Attorneys General Association. That effort was not to be confused with Sydney Hupp’s overtures to Chick-fil-A, the fast-food chain in which Marlyn Pruitt sought to become a franchisee.

  The mattress story—which came from Millan Hupp’s testimony—broke on June 4 and marked the final, depraved stage of Pruitt’s brief but florid career as a federal employee. Now the stories came as relentlessly as a summer shower over Washington: He ordered his subordinates to drive him around Washington so he could find an overpriced Ritz-Carlton moisturizer he was fond of. Like a cut-rate potentate, he commanded underlings to fetch him protein bars. By the end of it all, there were sixteen separate investigations into Pruitt’s transgressions, though that number did not do full justice to the hubris of a small, compact man who imagined himself bound for great things.

  “Every fucking day this guy had a new story,” a senior White House official later said. There was something impressively insistent about the corruption, as if Scott Pruitt genuinely thought himself invincible.

  Some speculated that Pruitt was finally forced to resign after a report that he had openly lobbied before Trump for U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions to be fired, so that he could take his job. “He was a little too aggressive,” Bannon thought. He made the president uncomfortable with his clumsy displays of ambition, his desperate hanging around the White House mess hall, like a teenager yearning to sit at the cool kids’ table.

  Maybe it was just that Trump realized that Pruitt was a bargain-basement lackey, and that there were innumerable other lackeys who could do the job he did without generating a year’s worth of headlines on a weekly basis. Laura Ingraham, the influential Fox News prime time host, had first called for Pruitt to be fired in June. She did it again on July 3, in a brutally compact message: “Pruitt is the swamp. Drain it.” Two days later, Scott Pruitt joined the ranks of the unemployed.

  Pruitt followed in the footsteps of Tom Price, leaving the EPA on an obsequious and self-righteous note, with a resignation letter that praised Trump’s “courage, steadfastness and resolute commitment to get results for the American people.” The tone indicated that Pruitt was already planning on a political comeback in his native Oklahoma. An endorsement from Trump would help, so Pruitt laid it on thick as lard. “I believe you are serving as President today because of God’s providence,” the letter continued. “I believe that same providence brought me into your service.”

  The victim ploy worked, to an extent. “The swamp came after him,” Bannon later said, calling Pruitt “by far the most effective” cabinet member. “That’s the reason he’s gone,” Bannon added. “If you’re effective, they’re going to come after you.” It was comforting to think so, but was it true? Had the likes of Laura Ingraham really joined the Resistance?

  Fearsome as he seemed during his tenure, Pruitt left with a legacy that was not likely to survive for long. That had been the case with his time as Oklahoma’s attorney general. Not one of Pruitt’s fourteen challenges to the EPA proved successful in fully getting rid of an EPA rule. Federal courts tossed six of the challenges, while seven others remained in litigation. His one partial victory, on a procedural matter, continued to be the subject of a legal dispute.

  Even before Pruitt resigned, the courts were eroding his accomplishments as an anti-environmental crusader. Faced with a lawsuit by fifteen states, Pruitt dropped his objection to a smog rule issued by the Obama administration. And the D.C. Circuit court ruled that he could not stay the rule on air pollution from oil and gas production. After he left the EPA, the agency—facing a near-certain defeat in court—reinstated the glider rule he had undermined.

  Pruitt’s successor, Andrew Wheeler, was a former coal lobbyist whose policy aims were identical to Pruitt’s. At least he showed less inclination to waste taxpayer funds. Wheeler had a few scandals of his own, including a fondness for racist social media posts, but these were relatively minor, given the enormity of Pruitt’s corruption.

  Zarba, the career EPA staffer, offered a droplet of praise: “He is not as stupid as Pruitt.” That was promising. It was also dangerous. There was no telling what intelligence combined with maliciousness might do to the EPA.

  Chapter 12

  The Cowboy

  In early May 2018, as Scott Pruitt was on his way to becoming President Trump’s most scandal-prone cabinet official, an EPA staffer named Michael Abboud reached out to reporters about a potential story. Abboud worked in the agency’s communications staff, but his outreach had nothing to do with celebrating the latest EPA achievement. Instead, he wanted to talk about Ryan Zinke.

  As the interior secretary, Zinke oversaw all federal lands. That included 58 national parks and 566 wildlife refuges, as well as 250 million acres of open space across the West under the control of the Bureau of Land Management, which also oversaw 700 million subsurface acres rich with minerals. This gave Zinke the power to regulate everything from entry fees at iconic parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite (which he wanted to raise) to drilling and mining claims on public lands (these, Zinke was happy to hand out practically for pennies).

  Pitching stories about the heads of other agencies did not fall into the typical job responsibilities of an EPA press aide. And the stories Abboud allegedly offered, according to reporting by the Atlantic, would reflect poorly on Zinke, thus diverting some of the attention that had relentlessly focused on Pruitt. The EPA administrator was quickly becoming everyone’s favorite government official, for all the wrong reasons. Days before, he had testified in front of two separate House committees on Capitol Hill. This had gone poorly, with Pruitt sounding evasive and dishonest, blaming career officials at the EPA for mistakes that were clearly his own. Abboud must have figured that if he could get reporters to chase after Zinke, Pruitt might be able to catch his breath.

  The idea was not entirely harebrained. Zinke was nearly as expert as Pruitt at inviting investigations into his behavior. In February 2018, New York Times columnist Gail Collins had enjoined readers to pick Trump’s “worst” cabinet member. Pruitt won, but Zinke came in second.

  Pruitt’s resignation in early July thrilled Trump’s foes. They couldn’t take down the president himself, but they could pick off his cabinet members. True, those cabinet members would simply be replaced by other conservative functionaries, and probably more competent ones at that, but those replacements would take time and political energy, especially if Senate confirmation were required. There was also the pleasure of watching Trump rage at his cabinet members, not because they did wrong but because they embarrassed him, called into question his ability to judge people and manage them. Taking out Pruitt did little to change the administration’s environmental policy, but it did inflict a psychic wound on the White House.

  The opposition was gleeful, and it wanted more. And nowhere was a better target than the Department of the Interior, which Ryan Zinke had turned into a combination of fiefdom and frat house. Downstairs, in the cafeteria, he installed the arcade game Big Buck Hunter, a gesture meant to “highlight #sportsmen contributions 2 conservation,” as he explained in a tweet. Upstairs, in his sumptuous office, Zinke met with energy executives and energy lobbyists who were now interior political appointees. There, they worked out plans to turn public lands over to private industry.

  “Dumb as a brick.” That was how a former top White House official described Ryan Zinke in early December 2018, just weeks before Zinke’s career as the secretary of the interior came to an end. This verdict was rendered lovingly, laughingly. He loved Zinke, a military man who looked the part of a military man. He was, like the very best of Trump’s people, straight out of central casting. Only the casting call was for a comedy of errors.

  “An absolute yahoo,” is how former interior climate expert Joel Clement reme
mbered Zinke. “All hat and no cattle.” But as was the case at the EPA and so many other federal agencies, incompetence may well have been the purpose, if the deeper purpose was to make Americans cynical about government, to have their worst fears about government confirmed. In that case, Ryan Zinke proved a fine exemplar of Trump-era public service.

  Ryan Zinke certainly had swagger, unlike the sclerotic Wilbur Ross or the irritating, unlikable Pruitt. “A huge piece of manpower Trump would love,” Bannon called him. He knew Zinke from his time running Breitbart News and wanted to give him something related to the military or national security, like the VA. Only that was not to be, so he was handed Interior.

  No member of Trump’s cabinet tried harder to play the part of the Washington outsider. He was the boot-clad iconoclast who disdained political convention, the Montana cowboy chafing at Beltway rules. On his first day at work, March 2, 2017, Zinke rode a horse to the Department of Interior headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C., arriving like a conquering king, accompanied by a U.S. Park Police escort, also on horseback. He was attired in cowboy hat and jeans, a rodeo windbreaker instead of a suit jacket. At Interior’s headquarters awaited a legion of uniformed officers, who received their new boss to the sounds of an honor song beaten out on a drum by a Bureau of Indian Affairs employee who also happened to be a member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe, based in Zinke’s native Montana.