A former top Environmental Protection Agency staffer and political adviser to Administrator Scott Pruitt told Democratic lawmakers this week that he was pushed out of the agency after he refused to approve first-class travel retroactively for another agency aide.
Kevin Chmielewski, a former Trump campaign staffer who was deputy chief of staff for operations at the EPA, told Democratic lawmakers that Pruitt wanted his aide, Samantha Dravis, the head of the EPA’s Office of Policy, to join him in first-class on a return flight from Morocco in December, where Pruitt went to promote U.S. natural gas.
The EPA’s inspector general’s office is reviewing the Morocco trip, which critics say was not compatible with the agency’s mission.
Chmielewski said he refused to approve Dravis’ first-class travel retroactively “because it violated federal travel regulations.”
He said another EPA staffer eventually signed off on the travel after it occurred.
The Democratic lawmakers detailed Chmielewski’s interview with them in letters they sent to Pruitt and President Trump Thursday.
The Democratic lawmakers say Chmielewski told them his refusal to sign off on Dravis’ first-class travel “appears to him to have been the final straw that caused you to remove him.”
Ryan Jackson, Pruitt’s chief of staff, soon informed Chmielewski that Pruitt “wished to fire or reassign him.”
Chmielewski is one of at least five officials, four of them high-ranking, who the EPA reassigned or demoted after they reportedly raised concerns about Pruitt’s spending habits, the New York Times previously reported.
The Democrats, including Sens. Tom Carper of Delaware, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Elijah Cummings of Maryland, and Reps. Gerry Connolly and Don Beyer of Virginia, say Chmielewski described “an extremely troubling picture of wasteful spending, unethical behavior and improper retaliation against EPA staff” at the agency.
“The new information provided by Mr. Chmielewski, if accurate, leaves us certain that your leadership at EPA has been fraught with numerous and repeated unethical and potentially illegal actions on a wide range of consequential matters that you and some members of your staff directed,” the lawmakers said.
Chmielewski says Pruitt would often choose places to travel based on a desire to visit them rather than official business, the Democratic lawmakers recounted.
Pruitt asked his staff to “find reasons” for him to travel to his home state of Oklahoma, where he was formerly attorney general, Chmielewski said.
He said Pruitt pushed agency officials to book flights on Delta, even though it is not the federal government’s contracted airline, “because you want to accrue more frequent flier miles.”
Chmielewski also detailed concerns he had with Pruitt’s spending related to his personal security, including purchases of bulletproof vests and weapons, biometric locks, and a security sweep of his office.
Pruitt is the first EPA administrator with round-the-clock security detail. He has said he frequently flies first-class because he has faced “unprecedented” threats from taunting travelers.
Chmielewski, according to the lawmakers, also disputed Pruitt’s claim that he didn’t know about massive raises the EPA granted to two aides who worked with Pruitt in Oklahoma. The agency granted the raises after the White House refused to approve them.
He also confirms reports that Pruitt fell behind on his $50-per-night rental payments last year to the wife of an energy lobbyist who leased him a bedroom in a condo on Capitol Hill.
Chmielewski told the lawmakers that he overheard a conversation on speaker phone occurring in the EPA chief of staff’s office in which J. Steven Hart, the energy lobbyist, said that Pruitt “never paid any rent to him” and that Pruitt’s daughter, who stayed in another bedroom of the condo, damaged the condo’s hardwood floors by rolling her luggage across it.
Ryan Williams, who is acting as a spokesman for Hart and his wife, Vicki, contested elements of Chmielewski’s account. He said Pruitt paid full rent to Vicki Hart, and her husband was not involved in handling rent payments.
“As the landlord, Vicki Hart was the only person who handled rent payments,” Williams told the Washington Examiner. “The rent was paid in full and the hardwood floors were never damaged.”
Pruitt’s supporters have defended questions about his ethics and spending, portraying critical reports as a campaign organized by liberal detractors of his deregulatory agenda at the EPA.
But Chmielewski is a former Trump campaign aide who previously worked for George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Mitt Romney.
