A scandal for all seasons: those Scott Pruitt ethics violations in full

Scott Pruitt, the seemingly immoveable administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, has an eclectic, almost itinerant, taste in corruption scandals.

Pruitt is best known for the ethical quagmires in this administration, shared with other Trump cabinet members, such as indulging in taxpayer-funded first class travel and spending much of his time playing an amenable host to corporations he is meant to regulate.


But the former Oklahoma attorney general’s appetite for controversy has also taken him in some daring and innovative new directions, offering up a smorgasbord that includes demanding his bodyguards drive him in search of his favourite moisturizing lotion, spending $1,500 on 12 pens, and bulldozing mere perceptions by literally living at an energy lobbyist’s apartment.

Pruitt’s tastes have a darker side, however, such as the revelations that he signed off on improper pay raises for favoured staff and has overseen an operation that physically bars journalists from covering his public genuflection for businesses. Not to mention that he has allegedly wreaked revenge upon colleagues who questioned his spending habits.

Even as Pruitt strives to tick off every conceivable ethical violation, the EPA administrator has still found time to peel back dozens of Obama-era rules aimed at reducing air and water pollution, as well as dismantle any vestige of action on climate change to the point where the very words have been scrubbed from the EPA website.

It’s been a dizzying, harrowing year for beleaguered agency staff, who have been tasked with unwinding their painstaking rule-making work while being led by an administrator who is the subject of a dozen different ethics investigations.

“It’s a toxic brew and the EPA is an unhappy place right now,” William Reilly, who was EPA administrator under George HW Bush, told the Guardian. “There is no precedent for this sort of behaviour and I don’t think the ship can be righted with this administrator. It would’ve got him fired in any administration but this one. It’s new and unwelcome territory.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/a-scandal-for-all-seasons-those-scott-pruitt-ethics-violations-in-full/ar-AAyrYcJ?li=BBnbcA1

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