Scott Pruitt, the climate-change skeptic at the fore of the Environmental Protection Agency, has become the latest Trump administration official to face the public’s wrath. On Monday, sitting at a table for two at Washington’s Teaism, Kristin Mink, a teacher and anti-Trump protestor, approached him and urged him to resign. “You’re slashing strong fuel standards for cars and trucks for the benefit of big corporations,” she told Pruitt. “You’ve been paying 50 bucks a night to stay in a D.C. condo that’s connected to an energy lobbying firm, while approving their dirty-sands pipeline.”

Neither of these charges is strictly untrue (though Pruitt denies there was anything untoward about the second)—by now, the E.P.A. chief’s litany of scandals is common knowledge, ranging from the obscure (he reportedly asked employees to procure a used mattress from Trump International Hotel) to the more conventionally egregious (shady deals with energy lobbyists and misuse of taxpayer cash) to Paul Manafort-style spending sprees, albeit on a smaller scale (he dropped around $3,000 on luxury stationery). But on Tuesday night, CNN supplemented the glut of Pruitt-focused headlines with a new report: that the E.P.A. head had directly asked Donald Trump to fire Jeff Sessions, and to install him as attorney general instead.

This revelation may offer some explanation as to why, despite the deluge of scandals and consequent investigations, Trump seems happy with Pruitt’s reign, content to overlook even the warnings of E.P.A. ethics chief, Kevin Minoli, who began as a staunch Pruitt apologist and is now publicly questioning whether the administrator has violated federal ethics rules. (Perhaps Minoli was tipped over the edge by Pruitt’s alleged attempts to leverage his position into a more-than-$200,000-a-year job for his wife, or by his apparent habit of using sirens to facilitate his commute.) “People are really impressed with the job that’s being done at the E.P.A.,” the president said last month, “Thank you very much, Scott.” According to The New York Times, Trump and Pruitt “speak frequently, and the president enjoys discussing his negative view of Jeff Sessions . . . with the embattled E.P.A. leader.” CNN’s report claims that, during one of these chats, “Pruitt offered to temporarily replace Sessions for 210 days under the Vacancies Reform Act, telling the president he would return to Oklahoma afterward to run for office.”

For Pruitt, the appeal of this deal is obvious: an easy escape from his scandal-plagued tenure at the E.P.A., and the chance to lord it over the Justice Department for a little less than a year. (In a statement to CNN, Pruitt called the story “simply false,” adding that “General Sessions and I are friends and I have always said I want nothing more than to see him succeed in his role.”) But for Trump, the arrangement may be equally compelling. The president has made no secret of his desire to fire Sessions, whose recusal he blames in part for the Russia investigation, and thus to attempt to quash Robert Mueller’s probe. But if Trump does fire his attorney general—all other repercussions aside—there’s a risk the Senate wouldn’t approve his lackey of choice. Under the 1998 Federal Vacancies Reform Act, he can fill a Cabinet position with anyone who’s already been confirmed by the Senate. If Sessions were ousted, then, Trump could hypothetically replace him with Pruitt. That way, two core factions of Trump’s base—evangelical voters and corporate fossil-fuel interests—would be content. And so would Trump, who, for up to 210 days, would have unfettered access to an attorney general who’s already displayed a model disdain for ethics.