EPA administrator criticizes inspector general's conclusions on Scott Pruitt's alleged abuses

Alexander Nazaryan

National Correspondent

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Yahoo News•March 4, 2020

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EPA administrator criticizes inspector general's conclusions on former head Pruitt's alleged abuses

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WASHINGTON — Scott Pruitt, the onetime administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, was once a potent symbol of corruption within the Trump administration, as well as of its push to roll back environmental protections. With his penchant for first-class flights and other reported excesses — including, most infamously, an ill-fated search for a used mattress from the Trump International Hotel — Pruitt became an increasing problem for a White House that had promised to hold public officials accountable. 

Though he defended Pruitt for a time, the president eventually tired of the criticism the former Oklahoma attorney general was attracting, including from conservatives like Laura Ingraham, the Fox News primetime anchor, who called for him to be fired. Trump fired Pruitt just a day after Ingraham’s second call for him to do so.

A subsequent report, issued in the spring of 2019, from the inspector general of the EPA found that “Pruitt and his staff incurred an estimated nearly $124,000 in excessive airfare expenses without sufficient justification to support security concerns requiring the use of first- and business-class travel.”

Andrew Wheeler, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, left, and Scott Pruitt. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images, Andrew Harnik/AP)

On Wednesday morning, however, the current EPA administrator, a former coal lobbyist, offered an unexpected defense of Pruitt, faulting his own inspector general for his conclusions.

“There are a number of errors in that report,” Wheeler said in response to a question from Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Ill., adding that the EPA would not seek to recoup any of the $124,000 the inspector general determined Pruitt and his top staffers had improperly spent on first-class travel and security arrangements.

Wheeler said that one of the flaws of the report by the EPA inspector general was that it ignored that Pruitt’s security detail had to fly with him. That means that if Pruitt flew first class, so would his bodyguards. Wheeler thus concluded that the true number of potentially recoverable funds should have been cut in half, to about $60,000.