A Washington consultant who has lobbied for foreign governments helped plan an aborted trip to Australia by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt.
Matthew C. Freedman, the chief executive of the Global Impact consulting firm, worked with a top EPA aide to facilitate a trip last year to Australia that Pruitt later scrapped after Hurricane Harvey struck the Gulf Coast.
Freedman previously was an international political consultant and lobbyist and was an employee of Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, in the 1980s when they worked to help former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
Manafort was indicted as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russia’s election interference and possible collaboration with the Trump campaign.
Freedman is not currently registered as a lobbyist but serves as treasurer for the American Australian Council, which seeks to bolster business ties between the two countries. He worked on Trump’s transition team for a period.
Freedman’s role is spelled out in email exchanges he had with Millan Hupp, who was the EPA’s deputy director of scheduling and advance, and other Pruitt aides obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Sierra Club and shared first with the New York Times.
The canceled trip is the latest example of Pruitt relying on people from outside government to plan and schedule foreign travel.
The EPA spent more than $100,000 on Pruitt’s trip to Morocco in December, which was organized by former Comcast lobbyist Richard Smotkin, who has known Pruitt for years, the Washington Post reported Tuesday. Since the visit, Smotkin won a $40,000-a-month contract last month with the Moroccan government to promote the country’s cultural and economic interests.
Also on Tuesday, the Times reported that Leonard Leo, who leads the conservative Federalist Society judicial group, helped plan Pruitt’s trip to Italy in June.
Leo accompanied Pruitt to a private mass at the Vatican that Leo helped arrange, the newspaper said. He dined with Pruitt and his top aides at a restaurant in Rome, where the bill for the meal totaled several hundred dollars per person.
Leo has been instrumental in helping recommend conservative judicial nominees to the Trump administration, including Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.
Pruitt is the subject of 11 federal investigations for his spending, ethics, and travel. The Morocco trip is being investigated by Congress and the EPA’s inspector general.
Even though the EPA canceled the Australia trip, the agency spent $45,000 to send a five-member advance team to the country to prepare, Reuters previously reported.
Australia is one of the largest coal producers in the Pacific region and principal supplier to China. Many of Pruitt’s visits domestically and overseas have to do with coal and natural gas production, but it is not known if that was the intent of the visit.
Smotkin, the Comcast lobbyist, connected Hupp, the EPA staffer, with Freedman, who helped promote the Australia trip. Smotkin messaged Hupp with the subject line “connecting,” an email obtained by the Sierra Club shows.
Freedman offered Hupp ideas for the trip.
“One initial step would be to get a better sense of the current US Australian environmental agreements that are currently in place and whether they should be changed or updated or canceled and replaced with others,” he wrote. “It would be relatively easy to put together a joint advisory task force on environment issues thus creating a new mechanism for ongoing discussions.”
Freedman later suggested he speak “once or twice a week” over the phone with EPA officials arranging the trip, and he said he had been in contact with top Australian officials.
He said Pruitt should meet with Canadian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
He even suggested Pruitt travel to the outback, with the caveat that the trip would take a full day and could conflict with a potential visit to a liquefied natural gas plant.
