Scott Pruitt has taken luxury flights to Rome and Morocco, spent months at the home of oil and gas lobbyists, hired a personal army, looked into bulletproof desks, arranged illegal raises for aides who spent much of their times doing his errands, snagged a Chick-fil-A franchise for his wife and set a new record for the term “fancy pants.” But he apparently managed to do it all with smoke signals and carefully timed blinks, because according to the results of a search into Pruitt’s emails produced just one (1), that would be uno, emails written to anyone outside the EPA during his first ten months in office.
According to Politico, Pruitt explains his monk-like denial of the electronic by claiming that he holds all his conversations “in person or over the phone”—presumably meaning that he bundles people into the $43,000 cone of silence he had installed inside his office. But that seems … not just unlikely, but ridiculous. Pruitt is already well known for fleeing his own office to use the phones of EPA employees out of fear that, despite having brought in outside security experts to scan for bugs, twice, someone might be listening in on his line.
Oversight groups said it seems implausible that someone as active as Pruitt, who meets frequently with political and industry allies, would have sent only a single email to someone outside EPA.
What seems much more likely is that, just as he likes to use phones other than his own, Pruitt has been making his emails using other accounts.
In fact, a Washington Post report back in April revealed that Scott Pruitt had at least four email accounts. These accounts, uncovered by Democratic Senators Jeff Merkley and Tom Carper, included not just Pruitt’s official address at “pruitt.scott@epa.gov,” but also “esp7@epa.gov”, “adm14pruitt@epa.gov” and “sooners7@epa.gov.” Those additional emails were clearly created for no purpose other than to allow Pruitt to conduct business without being observed. Staffers at the EPA noted then that “Pruitt’s use of different emails has raised concern among agency lawyers.” Those are just the semi-official “.gov” emails that were found—and it’s not as if Pruitt volunteered their existence.
At the time of that story, Pruitt’s assistants explained away the additional addresses by saying that one was used for “calendering” and another for “public correspondence.” And that’s a quandry: Because if Pruitt had an email account specially set up for public correspondence, how can there only be one email between Pruitt and anyone outside the EPA?
The only email that Pruitt acknowledges sending from any of his epa.gov addresses was to an energy consulting firm that had invited him to speak at an investment gathering.
What seems dead obvious is that Scott Pruitt is either not turning over all emails from his epa accounts, or—even more likely—he has other email accounts. Pruitt’s paranoia about being overheard has led him to take ludicrous steps to secure his phone and offices. The idea that he has done the same with his emails seems almost certain.
And that Republicans will continue to protect Pruitt, despite a string of scandals that’s outpacing Al Capone, is just as predictable. Because when Donald Trump says “zero tolerance,” he doesn’t mean rich white guys. Rich white guys get second chances. And third. And … please, take another.