Dems: Pruitts Phone Booth Useless And Sweep For Bugs In His Office Improper

By Matt Shuham | April 23, 2018 5:07 pm

Five Democrats wrote to House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-SC) Monday arguing that two well-publicized purchases by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt — a $43,000 phone booth in his office and a $3,000 sweep of the same office for surveillance devices — were useless and improper.

Though the EPA has argued that Pruitt’s phone booth, the purchase of which was recently deemed illegal by the Government Accountability Office, “enables him to use this area to make and receive classified telephone calls (up to the top secret level) for the purpose of conducting agency business,” the Democrats said it might not be able to serve even that purpose.

“Documents provided to us from within EPA indicate that as of March 2017, the Administrator’s office was not cleared for classified communications,” they wrote. “The phone booth, which was installed months later, appears to be a ‘privacy booth’ installed by a vendor that describes itself as a ‘manufacturer and distributor of acoustical products’ whose mission is ‘to solve sound and noise control problems to improve every environment of your life.’”

“Even if the phone booth itself is authorized to receive top secret communications, that would mean classified information is being received in an otherwise not-secured location, preventing the Administrator from discussing it with any other cleared person,” the Democrats, Sens. Tom Carper (D-DE) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Reps. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), Gerry Connolly (D-VA) and Don Beyer (D-VA), said.

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https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/dems-pruitts-phone-booth-useless-and-sweep-for-bugs-in-his-office-improper