President Trump's corrupt EPA chief is out. The resignation letter is nuts, and mentions God's divine providence and other creepy surreal stuff that doesn't belong.
President Trump accepted the resignation of Scott Pruitt, his Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Trump said in a tweet on Thursday.
Pruitt built his political career in Oklahoma by suing the very administration Trump later picked him to lead. He then mocked the office in a series of laughably overt corruption scandals.
And that resignation letter, man. What a heap of crazy. What does this paragraph even mean?
Anyway. Don't get too excited he's leaving. The next guy won't be distracted with all the petty thievery. He'll have bigger thievery in mind.
"It is expected that E.P.A. deputy Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist who shares Mr. Pruitt's zeal to dismantle climate change regulations, will act as the agency's leader until a new administrator is nominated by Mr. Trump & confirmed by the Senate."
From the New York Times:
Mr. Pruitt had been hailed as a hero among conservatives for his zealous deregulation, but he could not overcome the stain of numerous ethics questions about his alleged spending abuses, first-class travel and cozy relationships with lobbyists.
Mr. Pruitt also came under fire for enlisting aides to obtain special favors for him and his family, such as reaching out to the chief executive of Chick-fil-A, Dan T. Cathy, with the intent of helping Mr. Pruitt's wife, Marlyn, open franchise of the restaurant.
Mr. Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general who built his career on lawsuits against the agency he would eventually lead, remained a favorite of Mr. Trump's for the majority of his tenure at the E.P.A. He began the largest regulatory rollback in the agency's history, undoing, delaying or blocking several Obama-era environmental rules. Among them was a suite of historic regulations aimed at mitigating global warming pollution from the United States' vehicles and power plants.
scott pruitt will return to his day job, licking coal into clean coal
— lvl45 ÇHÄÖ§ þÖ†Ú§ whð †hïñk§ hê ¢åñ lêårñ ¢µr§ïvê (@thetomzone) July 5, 2018
New EPA Chief-in-Waiting Andrew Wheeler Is a Lapdog for Big Coal https://t.co/dZBv0G3tlM
— Noah Shachtman (@NoahShachtman) July 5, 2018
Scott Pruitt's resignation is overdue, but the new guy Andrew Wheeler has his own issues.
Wheeler is
-VP of Washington's Coal Club, a group of 300 coal producers & advocates
-former aide to Senator Inhofe, virulent climate change denier
-lobbied for all these places— Kaz Weida (@kazweida) July 5, 2018
I've read the first sentence of this paragraph about 87 times now pic.twitter.com/40J67hxzui
— Kate Bennett (@KateBennett_DC) July 5, 2018
Pruitt once harbored political ambitions. Then he joined a Cabinet that was vastly wealthier than he was.
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) July 5, 2018
Great time to recall the fawning coverage of Pruitt in outlets like National Review only a few months ago, portraying him as Presidential material. https://t.co/FjthKD7jw7
— Eyal Press (@EyalPress) July 5, 2018
Pruitt was undone because public servants – some Trump appointees, some civil servants – raised objections to what they saw as unethical and illegal behavior, sometimes at great personal cost https://t.co/AfinA7tUvs
— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) July 5, 2018
The new acting head of the @EPA is Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist who knows Washington, per @CoralMDavenport. I'd hold off on celebrating Pruitt's resignation. Wheeler won't be distracted with Chick-Fil-A franchises while he's wrecking the planet. https://t.co/2EpYKF5vmk
— Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith) July 5, 2018
does Pruitt… does he get to keep the mattress and all that hand lotion and stuff?
— Xeni Jardin (@xeni) July 5, 2018
One day before he resigned, Scott Pruitt showed up at the White House for the July 4 party and fireworks. pic.twitter.com/MQAyNL1zbO
— Robert Costa (@costareports) July 5, 2018
#blessed #bless #service #God #courage #transformative #unprecedented #honor #Godspeed ?? ? #confidence pic.twitter.com/6MW5w5yspU
— Roben Farzad (@robenfarzad) July 5, 2018