Got to bag it up.
Got to bag it up. Drew Angerer / Getty Images

When we last surveyed the mess of scandals trailing the man in charge of upholding this country's environmental standards, we talked about the millions of taxpayer dollars he spends on a security detail, his sweetheart condo deal, and his $40,000 phone booth. In the following months the scandals have kept on stacking up, but in the last few days there's been some real doozies.


The Washington Post now reports that Pruitt makes his young staff members book hotels on their personal credit cards and then sticks them with the bill:

In one instance, according to former deputy chief of staff Kevin Chmielewski, Hupp was stuck with a bill of roughly $600 for a booking she had made for the administrator’s family during the transition. Chmielewski said in an interview last month that he was in Jackson’s office when Hupp approached Pruitt’s chief of staff to explain that the period for transition reimbursements had expired and that Pruitt had not covered the bill.

The incident, aspects of which were first reported in the Hill newspaper, prompted Jackson to leave $600 in cash in Hupp’s drawer.

Meanwhile, CNN reports that Pruitt keeps a secret calendar he uses to hide meetings with industry executives, attorneys, and climate-change-denying cardinals charged with multiple instances of sexual assault.

Chmielewski again comes through with the details: "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."

Back in April, House Democrats called for Pruitt's resignation. Nothing happened with that because Pruitt does the will of giant fossil fuel companies, which greatly pleases the people of West Virginia, which greatly pleases the president.

Pruitt's fondness for fellating fossil fuel companies (sorry) emerges from a deep and abiding religious belief that God commanded Adam and Eve to "have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."


If you want to drag your jaw around your apartment floor for an hour, listen to Embedded's investigation of Pruitt. They explain how his religious views drive his career and detail his long history of rule-bending and norm-flouting, going back to the time he used his Oklahoma megachurch to help propel him to his first political victory.