5 lies Scott Pruitt told this week about his mounting scandals

The EPA Administrator is trying to defend himself against ethics questions surrounding a housing deal with a lobbyist, first-class travel, and improper raises for aides

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt spent much of this week trying to hold on to his job as new details about his questionable hiring and ethically dubious housing arrangements dribbled out in the press.

And as he made the rounds at conservative media outlets to tout his accomplishments -- rolling back various environmental regulations — and swing back at criticism, Pruitt made some outlandish claims.

Aside from his usual misleading platitudes, for instance that the Obama-era Clean Water Rule would have regulated puddles (it explicitly does not), Pruitt generously scattered rhetorical chaff to obscure his involvement in any wrongdoing at the EPA.

Here were some of his biggest whoppers.

Lie 1: “This agency has been a bastion of liberalism since day one.”

Pruitt said this on the Washington Times podcast this week while talking about how the controversies he’s facing are being whipped up by the environmental left and ideologically opposed career staffers at the EPA.

This is a laughably false statement if you know even the slightest bit of history about the EPA, which you would hope its administrator would know. It was a conservative Republican administration that led the charge to create an agency to protect the environment.

“Because environmental protection cuts across so many jurisdictions, and because arresting environmental deterioration is of great importance to the quality of life in our country and the world, I believe that in this case a strong, independent agency is needed,” wrote Richard Nixon in a letter to Congress seeking to establish the EPA in 1970.

The agency’s first administrator William Ruckelshaus had been a Republican member of the Indiana House of Representatives and was also an assistant attorney general in the Nixon administration. During his tenure, he advocated for market-based strategies for reducing pollution in air and water. In other words, not all that liberal.

Lie 2: “This was like an Airbnb situation”

This was Pruitt’s defense for staying in a $50-a-night condo near Capitol Hill co-owned by Vicki Hart, the wife of a prominent lobbyist, that he gave in an interview with Fox News’ Ed Henry.

He signed a lease (which you don’t do on Airbnb) but was only billed for the nights he was there, paying $6,100 over six months. He insists that this is an appropriate market rate, and EPA’s ethics office said as much in a hastily drawn up memo. Just about anyone who has lived in DC knows it isn’t.

Pruitt said his landlords “used the facility at the same time I was there.” Sure. To host fundraisers for Republicans.

He also said that “I was living out of a suitcase when I transitioned to DC. My wife was not with me. My children were not with me. My dog was not with me.” His daughter, McKenna Pruitt, did in fact stay with him at the condo while she was a White House intern.

Vicki Hart said his daughter staying there would violate the lease agreement.

“The rental agreement was with Scott Pruitt,” Vicki Hart, who co-owns the property, told ABC News. “If other people were using the bedroom or the living quarters, I was never told, and I never gave him permission to do that.”

And Politico reported Friday that Pruitt was so reluctant to give up the pad that the landlords became frustrated and changed the locks after he left.

“Scott Pruitt is the Kato Kaelin of Capitol Hill,” source familiar with the matter told Politico. “He is the long-term house guest who takes advantage of his hosts and refuses to take a hint about when it’s time to leave.”

If it were an Airbnb-type situation, I suspect the host and tenant would leave 1-star reviews for each other.

Lie 3: “Mr. Hart has no clients that have business before this agency”

Vicki’s husband, J. Steven Hart, is the chairman of powerhouse lobbying firm Williams & Jensen. Its clients include oil giant ExxonMobil, Canadian pipeline firm Enbridge, and liquified natural gas exporter Cheniere Energy.

Hart himself lobbied the EPA on behalf of OGE Energy, a regulated utility with coal, natural gas, and renewable power in its portfolio.

While Pruitt was staying at the condo, the EPA approved an expansion of Enbridge’s Alberta Clipper pipeline carrying oil from Canadian tar sands. The New York Times reported the company was also hit with a $61 million fine from the EPA in 2010 for an oil spill in Michigan.

In 2017, ExxonMobil reached a settlement with the EPA for violations of the Clean Air Act, including a $2.5 million civil penalty.

And Cheniere Energy owns the only natural gas export terminal in the continental United States. Pruitt went to Morocco last December (more below) to pitch the country on US natural gas.

Perhaps Mr. Hart recognized that the arrangement was suspicious, which is why he crossed his name off the lease and wrote his wife’s name in instead:

Lie 4: “The two trips I took, Ed, were all in advancement of air quality issues, environmental issues to this country.”

Pruitt’s two international trips in 2017 included a meeting with environment ministers at the G7 environment summit in Italy and an unannounced trip to Morocco.

The trip to Morocco, where Pruitt flew first class, cost $40,000, not including the expenses for his full-time security detail. Pruitt insisted that this trip was well within EPA’s wheelhouse and centered on international environmental cooperation.

But the official EPA press release about the trip says the following in literally the first sentence (emphasis added):

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt attended bilateral meetings in Morocco this week where he outlined U.S. environmental priorities for updating the Environmental Work Plan under the U.S.-Morocco Free Trade Agreement and the potential benefit of liquified natural gas (LNG) imports on Morocco’s economy.

Being a salesman for natural gas is definitely NOT in Pruitt’s job description.

Lie 5: “My staff did it. And I found out about it yesterday and I changed it.”

The Atlantic revealed that Pruitt asked the White House to approve huge raises for two close aides. When the White House declined to do so, Pruitt’s staff invoked a rarely-used provision of the Safe Drinking Water Act to secure the pay bumps. The provision allows the EPA to hire up to 30 people without approval from the President or Congress and is meant to bring experts into the agency to deal with critical water issues.

Pruitt has used this provision several times before to hire industry lobbyists at the EPA, so it’s not unfamiliar to him. And the law explicitly requires that administrative hires get approval from, you know, the administrator.

But Pruitt told an incredulous Ed Henry on Fox News that he didn’t know about the raises until this week. “You don’t know? You run the agency. You don’t know who did this?” Henry asked.

“I found out about this yesterday, and I corrected the action,” Pruitt said.

After the interview, the Washington Post confirmed that Pruitt did in fact ask his staffers to find a way to secure raises for his aides.

The question now is whether any of this will register with President Trump, who met with Pruitt on Friday at the end of the rough week for the administrator. Republicans are increasingly divided over Pruitt with three House members calling for him to resign and two Senators publicly registering their support. Trump will have to decide whether Pruitt’s high-profile work undoing regulations at the EPA outweighs the negative attention he’s received. Or perhaps yet another controversy will emerge from the White House and push Pruitt’s troubles into the background.