Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt resigned Thursday just as new allegations surfaced about a senior scheduler he had fired last summer after she questioned the legality of his practice of retroactively deleting meetings from his calendar.
The New York Times reported Thursday, just minutes before Trump announced the resignation, that Madeline G. Morris was fired by Kevin Chmielewski, Pruitt’s former deputy chief of staff.
Morris confirmed Wednesday that she was fired after raising objections about the deletions, which she believed were illegal. She said Chmielewski did not tell her why she was being fired.
The newspaper explained that deleting a meeting retroactively from a Cabinet official’s public records could violate the Federal Records Act. The law requires agencies to maintain and preserve public documents, and killing records of his meetings would also violate another law meant to keep documents from being intentionally deleted.
Pruitt’s EPA may have also violated another law by continuing to pay Morris for six weeks after she was fired. Pruitt is currently under 13 investigations by the EPA inspector general and other federal watchdog agencies.
Morris had worked for nearly a decade in Washington for a number of Republican lawmakers before working as a federal affairs expert for the lobbying arm of Koch Industries.
One of incidents highlighted by Morris involved the deletion of several of Pruitt’s meetings during a spring 2017 trip to Rome, which included a meeting with a cardinal who had been under investigation for sexual assault.
The newspaper said Morris was called by two agency lawyers last July who told her the changes she was making to Pruitt’s schedule might be illegal, according a person familiar with the calls. Morris questioned the legality of the changes to both Chmielewski and Ryan Jackson, Pruitt’s chief of staff. She was fired a few days after raising these questions.
