Former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt observed his first year as EPA Administrator over the weekend. It was a year ago Saturday when he took over the job in the Donald Trump presidency.
As Politico’s Morning Energy Report indicated, it wasn’t necessarily a happy occasion.
“HARSH WORDS MARK END OF YEAR ONE: Saturday marks one year for Scott Pruitt at the helm of EPA – and it’s certainly been a year rocked by turbulence. When the former Oklahoma attorney general stepped into the agency, many predicted the rollback of Obama-era regulations and the pullback in environmental policing. But it’s the controversy over first-class travel that will ring in the anniversary for the administrator – which has even generated calls from fellow Republican supporters who think he should probably stick to flying coach.
But on Thursday, one EPA career official defended Puitt in an interview with Pro’s Alex Guillén, attesting to the extremely toxic nature of the vitriol Pruitt faces when traveling. As an example, Henry Barnet, director of the Office of Criminal Enforcement that houses Pruitt’s 24/7 protective detail, recounted an incident from October at the Atlanta airport when an individual approached Pruitt with his cell phone recording, yelling at him “Scott Pruitt, you’re f—ing up the environment.”
“The team leader felt that he was being placed in a situation where he was unsafe on the flight,” said Barnet, a longtime law enforcement official who joined EPA in 2011. “We felt that based on the recommendation from the team leader, the special agent in charge, that it would be better suited to have him in business or first class, away from close proximity from those individuals who were approaching him and being extremely rude, using profanities and potential for altercations and so forth.”
Barnet acknowledged Pruitt is frequently recognized in public – a lesser occurrence for some of his lower-profile predecessors. But former administrators Gina McCarthy and Christine Todd Whitman both had tense encounters with the public, and neither had the level of security that Pruitt maintains. Pruitt’s security detail now performs a new threat assessment every 90 days “because the threats are so prevalent” to make sure procedures and tactics are up to date, Barnet said.