Scott Pruitt resigned from his post as administrator of the EPA on Thursday, finally bowing to a torrent of spending, travel and secrecy scandals that ended his run as one of President Donald Trump’s most aggressive anti-regulation enforcers.

Trump continued praising his embattled EPA leader even after the ax fell — and months after most of his White House aides, including chief of staff John Kelly, had soured on him because of the increasingly bizarre accusations concerning Pruitt's use of agency employees to obtain housing, lotion, used mattresses, dinner with a Vatican cardinal and a job for his wife.


But the news about Pruitt had also turned potentially more dangerous, including what congressional Democrats said Thursday was evidence that his top aides had altered his official EPA calendar to hide politically troublesome meetings. Meanwhile, the coming media maelstrom over Trump's soon-to-be-announced Supreme Court nomination should soon erase any momentary headlines over Pruitt's departure.

"Within the Agency Scott has done an outstanding job, and I will always be thankful to him for this. ... We have made tremendous progress and the future of the EPA is very bright!” Trump tweeted. He added that Andrew Wheeler, Pruitt's deputy, would become acting administrator.

Trump later told reporters that "no final straw" led to Pruitt's decision to step down.

"Look, Scott is a terrific guy," the president said. "And he came to me and he said, ‘I have such great confidence in the administration. I don’t want to be a distraction.’ And I think Scott felt that he was a distraction.”

Trump said the decision had been in the works for "a couple of days."

Pruitt's critics were mainly jubilant — though deeply suspicious of Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist who is widely expected to pursue the same agenda of undoing former President Barack Obama's climate change agenda.

"Thank God he’s gone," Sen. Tom Carper, the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said of Pruitt. "This is a day to celebrate."

Among Trump's confidants, Oklahoma billionaire oilman Harold Hamm was one of a dwindling number of people defending Pruitt, people close to Hamm and the White House told POLITICO.

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Thursday's move came just two days after POLITICO reported Pruitt installed the former treasurer of his super PAC to lead the office in charge of releasing his public records and after CNN reported Pruitt directly asked Trump to remove Attorney General Jeff Sessions and give the position to him. Those were only a couple of the latest damaging accusations about Pruitt just this week, following months of drip-drip-drip disclosures about a $50-a-night Capitol Hill condo rental from a lobbyist's wife, first-class travel, dramatic increase in spending on security and uncompensated personal work that he received from EPA aides. (See POLITICO's running summary of Pruitt’s controversies here.)

In his resignation letter, Pruitt praised Trump, but said the litany of bad headlines had forced him to leave the job.

"It is extremely difficult for me to cease serving you in this role first because I count it a blessing to be serving you in any capacity, but also, because of the transformative work that is occurring," Pruitt wrote. "However, the unrelenting attacks on me personally, my family, are unprecedented and have taken a sizable toll on all of us."

Even as more than a dozen investigations were initiated by EPA’s inspector general, the House Oversight Committee, the White House, the GAO and the Oklahoma Bar Association, Trump continued to publicly back Pruitt, who was strongly supported by many conservatives. Since the spring, when his condo deal came to light, triggering a snowballing series of embarrassing stories about the EPA administrator, Pruitt managed to keep his head above water.

But some sources suggested Trump's support for Pruitt began to crumble after news emerged that Pruitt had pressed an aide to try to buy a used mattress from Trump's hotel, and that he had security staff chauffeur him around Washington to buy his favorite brand of skin lotion — raising concerns that more such stories would follow. The timing of the resignation announcement also appeared favorable, since the announcement of a new Supreme Court nominee Monday would likely overshadow the EPA news.

One Republican close to the White House said that Trump's support for Pruitt dropped with the realization that Wheeler could easily carry out the same regulatory rollback — but without the scandalous headlines. Some Republicans had been making that argument for months, however.

“It became increasingly apparent to the president, from conversations with the Hill and people inside the administration, that everyone loves Andrew Wheeler, and that Trump could get the same results without the drama,” the Republican said. “If they did not have an heir apparent, this would probably be a different situation.”

Environmentalists were quick to take a victory lap over Pruitt's resignation.

"Scott Pruitt’s corruption and coziness with industry lobbyists finally caught up with him," Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, said in a statement. "This victory belongs to the hundreds of thousands of activists who fought to protect the Environmental Protection Agency from a corrupt crony set on destroying it from the inside."

But some conservatives lamented that Pruitt had finally fallen victim to pressure from his political opponents.

"Lesson to other Trump officials from Pruitt resignation: Give the left/media/organized greens any molehill and they will turn it into K2," wrote Kimberley Strassel, a Wall Street Journal columnist and member of its editorial board. "Most of the accusations were overwrought, but the barrage was overwhelming. Let's hope an equally reformist successor denies them a repeat."

Conservative pundit Hugh Hewitt defended Pruitt as a "good friend and a very good man, caricatured by [the] left" and the mainstream media.

"I hope he sets to work on a memoir ASAP and deals out a tenth of what he took," Hewitt wrote on Twitter. "He’s a man of great faith and perseverance so he probably won’t, but the attacks on his family were unconscionable."

A handful of moderate Republican lawmakers called for Pruitt to be ousted early on, but congressional leaders supportive of his deregulatory agenda prevented the hot water Pruitt was in from increasing beyond a gentle simmer. And despite White House staffers’ annoyance at his public stumbles, Pruitt reportedly enjoyed for months a chummy relationship with the president himself. The pair reportedly even gabbed on the phone regularly.

Pruitt's support among Republicans began to wane after emails and testimony from close aides showed that Pruitt on multiple occasions had used EPA resources and personnel to carry out errands and search for a job for his wife, Marlyn.

With scrutiny intensifying, half a dozen aides close to Pruitt departed EPA within a few weeks of each other, including his top policy adviser, his chief of security and a longtime friend from Oklahoma whom Pruitt had placed in charge of the Superfund program.

Emails released following lawsuits and aides’ testimony to House investigators revealed that Pruitt had used EPA staff to search for housing for him and to inquire about obtaining a Chick-fil-A franchise for his wife — potential violations of laws prohibiting tasking federal workers with personal matters. Further, it was shown that Pruitt had used his aides to seek other employment opportunities for his wife, including from major GOP donors — raising questions about whether Pruitt had used his official position to benefit his family.

For Pruitt’s critics, these revelations moved beyond other Pruitt actions that were questionable but politically survivable.

“His actions related to his wife's employment and the quid-pro-quo condo situation with industry lobbyists may have crossed a line into criminal conduct punishable by fines or even by time in prison,” wrote several House Democrats in a letter asking the FBI to open a criminal investigation.

On Thursday, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released new transcripts from interviews with Pruitt’s closest aides, backing up aspects of many of the recent allegations against him.

Three aides, including chief of staff Ryan Jackson, acknowledged removing many meetings from his calendars deemed “personal,” including retroactively removing reference to a dinner with Cardinal George Pell after Pell's arrest on alleged sexual abuse charges.

“I did that because there were — and there have been since — just personal dinners or personal meetings which he has had that if it doesn’t relate to EPA business, I don’t think it’s necessary to put it on the schedule,” Jackson told Oversight Committee staff.

Another former aide, policy adviser Samantha Dravis, said she helped Marlyn Pruitt seek employment opportunities during work hours by tapping into her connections to conservative organizations. But she said Pruitt’s push for his wife to land a $250,000-a-year post given her limited work experience was too much — even for the Federalist Society. Dravis said she ultimately refused to contact certain organizations and expressed concern doing would violate the Hatch Act.

“I was explicitly asked by Administrator Pruitt to assist Marlyn with obtaining this employment,” Dravis said.

Dravis also said Pruitt originally hoped to become attorney general rather than Jeff Sessions and had “one or two” discussions with her about his ambitions for the post after he became head of the EPA. She said he “hinted” that there had been a discussion with Trump about the matter but didn’t reveal further details.

Meanwhile, influential conservative voices began questioning whether Pruitt’s antics were finally causing too much drag on the president’s agenda.

Laura Ingraham, the conservative pundit known to be a favorite confidant of Trump, tweeted June 13 that Pruitt's bad judgment was hurting the president and meant he had "gotta go." The National Review called for his ouster, saying Pruitt had mistreated taxpayers. And Republican senators started saying Pruitt should be hauled in for a hearing, though they stopped short of calling for his resignation.

The president did not immediately name a nominee to serve as a permanent successor, as he did for similar high-profile departures in recent months. Senate Republicans have questioned whether another administrator could even be confirmed this year given the Senate’s tight schedule and the GOP’s razor-thin majority.

That leaves Pruitt’s deputy, Wheeler, in charge at EPA in an acting capacity for the foreseeable future.

Wheeler previously worked as an attorney and lobbyist at Faegre Baker Daniels, where one of his clients was coal company Murray Energy, whose owner Robert Murray has pressed both the president and his Cabinet secretaries for generous policy actions to help coal.

He previously worked as a top aide to Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), who prides himself as a skeptic of climate change.

Wheeler is a more traditional Washington conservative than Pruitt, familiar with the workings of both the town and Congress. But environmentalists see little practical difference between Wheeler and Pruitt, who arrived at the agency after suing it 14 times and with no background in environmental policy.

Wheeler, like Pruitt, is expected to continue his deregulatory agenda, rolling back Obama-era environmental regulations like the Clean Power Plan or the Waters of the U.S. rule. And the White House is likely to continue its quest to slash EPA’s budget drastically, although Congress has twice rejected such cuts and some Republicans have questioned whether the agency can go any lower.

Nancy Cook and Daniel Strauss contributed to this report.



CORRECTION: A previous version of this report misstated the home state of billionaire oilman Harold Hamm. He is from Oklahoma.