Those trips home from Washington are coming back to haunt Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt. Documents released in the past several days revealed how the EPA tried to justify some of the expensive charter flights taken by the former Oklahoma Attorney General, including $14,000 for a business trip around Oklahoma.
The documents include several memorandums from EPA attorneys who justified the charter flights last June, July and August, according to CNN.
Those trips are now the focus of an investigation by the EPA inspector general who wants to know more about Pruitt’s travel practices including numerous trips to Oklahoma where he still has a home in Tulsa.
But the $14,435 flights that took him from Tulsa to Guymon in the Panhandle caught the eye of his critics.
As CNN’s website reported, “After a meeting with landowners, the plane shuttled him to Oklahoma City, the state capital, where he met with a newspaper editorial board and state officials. (Days later, The Oklahoman published an editorial, “Citizens should welcome EPA changes,” defending his controversial moves at the agency.)”
But the documents also showed the air travel had won approval the previous day from the EPA’s acting general counsel. Approval was made on the grounds it was for official business and “Guymon is not accessible through commercial means.”
The documents were found by the watchdog group Environmental Integrity Project and shared with CNN. Oklahomans know it’s a long 4 to 5 hour trip from either Oklahoma City or Tulsa to reach Guymon. The documents said “the time constraints on the Administrator’s schedule did not allow the Administrator to travel by ground transportation.”
But Pruitt was driven between Tulsa and Oklahoma City which is about a 90-minute drive and he took four of those trips in three days according to the documents.
Each time, Pruitt was driven the 100 miles so he could stay at his home instead of a hotel.
“There is no lodging costs to EPA at all for this trip,” a travel itinerary notes.
Reached for comment, EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman said: “With respect to visiting Guymon, it was an important stop on our WOTUS [Waters of the United States] tour where we were able to hear comments from people who have been directly affected by the rule, whose voices have been disregarded in the rulemaking process. By visiting with government officials and citizens, we treated Oklahoma exactly like we did North Dakota, Minnesota, Indiana and every other state we visited during the tour.”
