Scott Pruitt Knows Exactly What He's Doing

Leave it to Chris Christie, the disgraced former New Jersey governor and ex-Donald Trump lapdog, to lower the boom on EPA administrator Scott Pruitt. Last weekend, after news broke that Pruitt had scored a sweetheart deal for a condo from a lobbyist pal in D.C., Christie predicted that it was finally time for Pruitt to go. "I don't know how you survive this one," Christie told ABC's "This Week." Well, I don't claim to know more about how Trump's swampland works than Christie, but here's one way Pruitt survives: Do not administer the Environmental Protection Agency (as the job title suggests), but dismantle it. And do it with sly efficiency, shameless devotion and frequent presidential ass kissing.

Even by the dank-basement ethical standards of the Trump administration, scoring a $50 a night condo – a fraction of the market rate – in Washington, D.C. from the wife of the head of the lobbying firm Williams & Jensen, doesn't look good. Especially since Williams & Jensen represented a Canadian energy company that was pushing a pipeline-expansion plan with the EPA, and which, lo and behold, the EPA approved. Of course, both the EPA and the lobbying firm dispute that there was any connection between the agency's action and the condo rental: "Any attempt to draw that link is patently false," said Liz Bowman, a spokeswoman for Mr. Pruitt. And as an example of just how fine-tuned Pruitt's ethical compass is, Pruitt himself has said he was "dumbfounded" that anyone considered it an ethical breech for him to rent a below-market-rate condo from a lobbyist who was pushing a case before an agency he is running.

And if that's not enough, as The Atlantic reported, Pruitt used a provision of the Safe Drinking Water Act to reappoint two longtime allies so that he could give them raises that the White House had rejected. One of those employees, Millan Hupp, was involved in Pruitt's personal search for housing last summer, an apparent violation of ethics rules.

What makes this especially damning for Pruitt is that it follows a long list of princely corruption, including spending more than $100,000 on first-class flights, apparently because he'd been accosted by another passenger once when flying coach.(The Washington Post reported that the EPA had considered a $100,000-a-month private jet contract but rejected it.) Pruitt, whose paranoid style is at times downright comical, also spent more than $43,000 on a soundproof phone booth for his office.

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