His Ethics Issues Keep Piling Up, but Pruitt Has Support of the President

First there was the pricey-flights he took around the world.  Then there was the leasing of a condo owned by an energy lobbyist in Washington D-C.

Now EPA Chief Scott Pruitt, the former attorney general from Oklahoma faces grilling over pay raises he got for two aides he brought from Oklahoma to help him at the giant agency.

As GQ reports, Pruitt saw a way to get them raises after his request was denied by the White House Presidential Personnel Office.  He found a loophole in the law.

And he found it less than two weeks after the White House denial. Pruitt relied on the Safe Drinking Water Act which allows the EPA Administrator to hire up to 30 people into the agency without approval of the White House and Congress. The provision was made law in 1996.

“By reappointing (the staffers) under this authority, they learned, Pruitt could exercise total control over their contracts and grant the raises on his own,” reported the magazine.

He had also used the same provision of the law to hire a longtime chemical industry lobbyist as head of the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention.

As GQ’s Jay Willis wrote in his article, “Assuming you’ve grown accustomed by now to this brand of unchecked self-dealing within the Trump administration, you can’t help but admire the brazenness of this stunt.”

“Again: Scott Pruitt is a bad person, but he is a really good lawyer,” he added.

As OK Energy Today reported earlier this week, Pruitt is at the top of the list of some observers as the next to possibly be fired by President Trump.  However, as the Daily Beast reported:

“President Donald Trump told Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt that “we’ve got your back” in a call Tuesday morning, two administration officials told the Associated Press. Trump also told Pruitt to “keep his head up” and said that the White House supported him, according to the report.”