Last night NY Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted this:
Senior administration official tells me Pruitt dismissal is still “coming.” Time will tell but we’ve repeatedly had replays of the movie where Kelly (and in this case most of WH) wants someone gone and Trump, who doesn’t like conflict, has to get dragged there
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) July 4, 2018
Sounds like she isn’t too convinced of her source, saying “time will tell” in her tweet.
And then this morning, CNN reported that Pruitt is getting close to being nixed:
Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt, facing additional reporting about his many controversies, is “inching forward to the tipping point,” a senior administration official said.
The official, describing the feeling within the administration towards Pruitt, wondered whether the EPA administrator would still hold his job as he could crop up in Democratic candidates’ ads hitting President Donald Trump’s “swamp.”
Ultimately, the decision is with Trump.
CNN wrote that the White House responded to their report by saying that Trump is indeed looking into the recent stories about Pruitt:
White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley told reporters on Tuesday that Trump is looking into the “numerous reports” about Pruitt.
“The President feels as though Scott Pruitt has done a really good job with deregulating the government, to allow for a thriving economy, that’s important to him, but these things matter to the President as well, and he’s looking into those,” Gidley said. “When we have an announcement, we’ll make it.”
That’s an interesting response, which makes me think there is definitely something to these reports.
As the Daily Caller pointed out, even Laura Ingraham has had it with Pruitt:
Pruitt is the swamp. Drain it.
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) July 3, 2018
The latest Pruitt controversy is that he and his aides keep a secret calendar:
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and his aides have kept “secret” calendars and schedules to overtly hide controversial meetings or calls with industry representatives and others, according to a former EPA official who is expected to soon testify before Congress. A review of EPA documents by CNN found discrepancies between Pruitt’s official calendar and other records.
EPA staffers met routinely in Pruitt’s office to “scrub,” alter or remove from Pruitt’s official calendar numerous records because they might “look bad,” according to Kevin Chmielewski, Pruitt’s former deputy chief of staff for operations, who attended the meetings.
A CNN review which compared Pruitt’s public calendar with internal EPA schedules and emails shows more than two dozen meetings, events or calls were omitted from his public calendar.
Chmielewski said that some interactions were intentionally removed from Pruitt’s calendar after they occurred, such as meetings in June 2017 between Pruitt and Cardinal George Pell, who was charged weeks later with multiple historical charges of sexual offenses. Pell has pleaded not guilty.
“We would have meetings what we were going to take off on the official schedule. We had at one point three different schedules. One of them was one that no one else saw except three or four of us,” Chmielewski told CNN. “It was a secret … and they would decide what to nix from the public calendar.”
Chmielewski says he was forced to leave the EPA in February after raising questions about Pruitt’s spending and management.
I get that Pruitt has been under attack a lot by the left who wants him gone. But in the public arena, having a secret calendar is tantamount to using personal email, as it hides things from both Congress and the American people.
According to the Daily Caller, Pruitt has done a lot of good:
Indeed, EPA eliminated 22 regulations in Pruitt’s first year, cutting $1 billion worth of red tape. Pruitt has also begun rolling back sweeping Obama-era regulations on power plants and over bodies of water.
But will that be enough for him to keep his job? Only Trump really knows at this point and I’m guessing we’ll find out sometime soon.