It’s hard to keep up with it all. But alongside all the rightful focus on Sessions/Trump/Russia, here’s another percolating story of a Trump cabinet nominee lying in his confirmation hearing.
And this one is just as blatant…. maybe even more so.
From Jay Michaelson(personal disclosure: I’m his spouse)at the Daily Beast:
A Feb. 17 investigation by Oklahoma City’s Fox 25 news station revealed that Pruitt used a private email account to coordinate strategy and talking points with fossil fuel companies to oppose environmental rules, among other things. And a subsequent review of more than 7,500 emails by the Associated Press showed that Pruitt used his private email to conduct official business, including communicating with staff and lobbyists.
That directly contradicts what Pruitt told Congress in January. In Pruitt’s pre-confirmation questionnaire, Senator Cory Booker asked, “Have you ever conducted business using your personal email accounts, nonofficial Oklahoma attorney general email accounts, text messages, instant messenger, voicemails, or any other medium?”
Pruitt’s responded: “I use only my official OAG [Office of the Attorney General] email address and government-issued phone to conduct official business.”
As Jay points out, the potential email-related case against Pruitt is a lot more solid than the GOP’s failed* non-case against Hillary Clinton and her email server. (That case cost $20 million, by the way.)
(*Commenters point out, bitterly, that the Republicans’ crusade on Hillary’s emails was a great success as a narrative weapon, re: the 2016 election’s result. I wrote “failed” to mean they failed to get an actual criminal conviction, or even a criminal trial, and that was what they were wanting. But, yeah, they sure ain’t complaining.)
There are thousands of private emails sent to and from Pruitt on his personal email, not just a small handful, that show him conducting all kinds of official government business via that email account. And (in contrast to Clinton, who never denied that she’d used a private server) he flat-out denied it during his hearing.
It is well worth focusing on Scott Pruitt. I don’t need to state the obvious here but it is always worth restating: Climate change is one of the most vital issues — and some would argue it is the singular most vital issue — facing our nation and our planet. Pruitt has been given charge of our Environmental Protection Agency in order to destroy it, which has long been his ideological bent.
The Center for Media and Democracy has been doing a great job digging into this, and they are not letting up. But it will be easy for the mainstream media to overlook this story given everything else going on. Let’s hope, and let’s apply some pressure, that Pruitt’s lie during his confirmation hearing gets the attention it should.