Scott Pruitt’s once bright political future is in freefall after his swift exit as head of the EPA, following an avalanche of revelations about his first-class flights, pricey security trappings, backdoor raises for proteges and cozy deals with lobbyists stretching back to his days as an Oklahoma lawmaker.

Some of the most outlandish news reports about Pruitt’s leadership at EPA went viral in recent months because of the bizarre details, such as the accusations that he had used his bodyguards to search for a rare brand of lotion or had tasked an aide with trying to buy a used mattress from the Trump International Hotel.


But beneath it all, according to ethics experts and Pruitt’s critics, was the appearance that he had serially misused his Cabinet position, sometimes for simple vanity but occasionally — most consequentially — in ways that benefited himself and his family, drawing civil and potentially even criminal inquiries. And eventually, it was too much even for President Donald Trump, one of Pruitt's most outspoken fans.

Trump said the decision to resign was Pruitt's and that "no final straw" had precipitated the move, which has been in the works for a couple days. But in fact, Trump had begun to grow tired of the torrent of negative news stories about Pruitt and had come to believe they were a distraction that wouldn’t go away, according to an administration official.

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.

"Scott is a terrific guy,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Thursday after tweeting out the news of Pruitt's resignation. "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."

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The news dismayed prominent Republican donor Doug Deason, who told POLITICO late Thursday that he's flabbergasted Trump would send such a loyal foot soldier packing.

"I am just so disappointed in the President’s failure to support Scott against the angry attacks from the loony left," said Deason, who had helped Pruitt pick new members of an influential EPA’s science advisory board last year. "Nothing he did amounted to anything big. He was THE most effective cabinet member by far."

"Scott Pruitt is a sacrificial lamb and I have no idea why," he added.

Chief of staff John Kelly had been pushing Trump for months to fire Pruitt, and he ramped up his campaign in recent days, according to one person close to the White House. The person described removing Pruitt as one of Kelly’s top priorities before leaving the administration, as he's expected to do sometime this summer.

But Kelly’s frustration with Pruitt alone would never be enough to secure the EPA administrator’s ouster.

At the White House, senior aides were increasingly convinced that Trump would soon push Pruitt out, but they didn't know exactly when and some were caught off guard by Thursday's announcement.

Pruitt, who believes he has a strong personal relationship with Trump, has told allies repeatedly in recent months that he wasn’t worried about his job, insisting that the president had his back.

But Pruitt nonetheless showed flashes of irritation over the wave of negative press attention that overtook him. He told aides recently that he believed the reports about him were unfair, adding that he simply didn’t understand why people were making such a big deal about his decision to enlist an aide to help his wife secure a Chick-fil-A franchise, according to another person familiar with the matter.

White House staffers had long ago given up on Pruitt, rarely coming to his defense when negative news stories dominated the headlines. Aides were sick of answering questions about the EPA chief and spoke privately about their hope that the president got rid of him. Even Pruitt’s own staff had begun to sour on him, with many worrying that their future career prospects would be damaged by their association with Pruitt’s tenure.

Each scandal seemed more damning than the last.

Pruitt faced criticism last year for his extensive first-class travel on the taxpayer dime and security expenses including a $43,000 soundproof phone booth in his office. Then news this spring that Pruitt had secured a $50-a-night Capitol Hill condo lease from the wife of a lobbyist kicked off several months of damaging headlines on a nearly daily basis. His staff talked of getting him a $100,000-a-month private jet lease. Two aides who came with him from Oklahoma received massive raises Pruitt was later forced to reverse. He replaced the head of his security detail who wouldn’t let him use lights and sirens to zip around the city like the president. And a top career official was dismissed after he questioned the security justifications for Pruitt’s beefed up, multimillion-dollar protective detail.

Questions were raised about why Pruitt hired a longtime friend, whose bank over the years issued Pruitt multiple mortgages and helped him buy part ownership of a baseball team, and who was recently banned from the banking industry, to run EPA’s Superfund program.

In recent weeks, former Pruitt aides told staffers on the House Oversight Committee about the administrator's search for a high-paying job for his wife and his use of EPA time and staff for personal matters. Although nascent, the new allegations raised questions of whether Pruitt had used his position to benefit his family or himself. Committee aides tell POLITICO their investigation will continue despite Pruitt's departure.

EPA’s inspector general opened multiple overlapping probes into Pruitt’s activities and spending. House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) turned heads when he launched his own investigation of Pruitt. Other inquiries are underway by the Government Accountability Office, the Oklahoma Bar Association and even the White House.

Pruitt’s controversial activities led conservatives to call for his departure.

“Pruitt is the swamp. Drain it,” Laura Ingraham, the conservative pundit known to have Trump’s ear, tweeted on Tuesday.

Democrats and environmental groups quickly claimed victory with Pruitt’s resignation.

“He made swamp creatures blush with his shameless excesses. All tolerated because President Trump liked his zealotry," Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) said.

“Ethics matter. So does a commitment to EPA’s central mission. Scott Pruitt failed miserably on both counts,” said Rhea Suh, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Within the White House, a less splashy headline also helped undermine Pruitt’s standing with Trump’s inner circle: The news, first reported in early January by POLITICO, that Pruitt was advocating quietly but firmly behind the scenes to replace Jeff Sessions as Trump’s attorney general. That ambition was a turning point that soured Pruitt to key White House aides, if not the president himself, officials said in the intervening months. Pruitt grew bolder, eventually directly asking Trump for the DOJ job, CNN reported on Tuesday, just two days before Pruitt resigned.

Pruitt’s troubles had been simmering for a long time as other Cabinet officials were picked off following their own scandals or tension with Trump, including HHS Secretary Tom Price, Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

His supporters noted that, unlike Price or Tillerson, Pruitt was viewed as an effective and loyal lieutenant to Trump.

"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 in his resignation letter to Trump.

Pruitt rose to prominence as Oklahoma’s attorney general, where he made his name suing the Obama EPA 14 times over what he called gross regulatory overreach. One of his greatest achievements was the Supreme Court’s early 2016 decision to block the Clean Power Plan, a massive regulation that set the first-ever carbon dioxide limits on the power industry, while a lower court reviewed the rule — the first time the justices had ever done that.

He convinced Trump that such tenacity would prove useful in fulfilling his many campaign promises to undo almost all of former President Barack Obama's environmental agenda.

It didn’t take long after Pruitt had arrived at EPA for him to halt and reverse key regulations Trump had vowed to roll back, including the power plant rule and Obama’s Waters of the U.S. rule, which farmers and other industries decried as federal overreach.

But Pruitt went beyond the standard-issue Washington conservative environmental agenda that called for repealing those rules.

EPA is soon expected to propose a much more restricted version of the Clean Power Plan to satisfy legal requirements. But Pruitt has also kept open the option not to replace it at all, a position that most legal experts agree is untenable but which helps satisfy the right-wing groups that want EPA to stop regulating greenhouse gases altogether.

More recently, Pruitt made it clear he was willing to fight California over rolling back auto emissions standards. Carmakers who asked EPA for tweaks to the program instead found an administrator more than willing to torpedo the fragile national program if one of the most anti-Trump states didn’t come to heel.

Pruitt proposed a new science policy that would exclude major public health studies while still accepting industry-backed research, a policy Republicans failed for years to pass out of Congress. He kicked academic researchers receiving funding from EPA off of key advisory boards, often replacing them with industry representatives. He made key policy changes to permitting rules and a key air quality program long sought by industry groups who said EPA was restricting their growth. He launched a review of how EPA calculates costs and benefits, a move that could make it harder to economically justify major regulations.

And he elevated climate change as a culture-war issue in a way that previous Republican administrators avoided.

Pruitt told POLITICO that he didn't even understand when critics called him a "climate denier” in an interview last summer. "What does it even mean? That’s what I think about it. I deny the climate? Really? Wow, OK. That’s crazy, in my view," he said.

As Hurricane Irma throttled Florida in 2017, the second of three major storms to devastate parts of the U.S. last year, Pruitt told CNN that it was "misplaced" to ask about climate change's effects on extreme weather during the disaster.

And Pruitt routinely criticized the “environmental left” for focusing too much on climate change to the detriment of other environmental problems like Superfund clean-ups and water infrastructure — although green groups said he failed to lead on those issues as well.

The climate change positioning helped Pruitt gain the ear of Trump, who had called the phenomenon a hoax created by the Chinese to disenfranchise U.S. manufacturing.

Pruitt outmaneuvered other top administration officials, including Tillerson and Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn, to convince Trump that the Paris agreement was a bad deal that put America second. Trump then made the U.S. the only nation on Earth to ditch the Paris climate agreement.

Unsurprisingly, Pruitt’s rapid rise and strong conservative pedigree drew talk of future political runs.

Although Pruitt eschewed this year’s Oklahoma gubernatorial race, many observers suspected he would be the top choice in 2020 to replace Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), who has not said whether he will run again but will turn 86 that year. Rumor swirled that the Senate gig would groom Pruitt for a 2024 presidential run, and Pruitt held meetings with politically connected people who could one day be useful for such a campaign, including a company linked to GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson and an Indiana coal executive-slash-Republican fundraiser.

But Pruitt’s political ambitions and penchant for secrecy eventually came back to bite him.

His behind-the-scenes lobbying for Sessions’ job earlier this year alienated him to top White House officials, and the slow drip of negative headlines about his travel, spending and hiring irritated them further.

But in late March, the news about his lobbyist-connected condo deal opened the floodgates to a seemingly endless stream of reports about Pruitt’s activities.

At first, the drip-drip of damaging stories was embarrassing but manageable.

Then, as part of a media tour that mostly consisted of friendly interviews with conservative outlets, Pruitt found himself forced into defense by a combative Fox News interview. Though the president was publicly supportive of Pruitt, the White House acknowledged it was reviewing his activities.

The investigation launched by Gowdy, the House Oversight chairman planning to retire after this year, showed the first cracks in Pruitt’s support on the Hill. Weeks later, Senate Republicans started airing concerns, while Inhofe — a longtime friend of Pruitt’s — said he was troubled by reports of Pruitt’s past purchase of a large Oklahoma City home from a telecom lobbyist when he was a state senator.

Inhofe, who later said Pruitt had allayed his concerns, praised his fellow Oklahoman’s work running EPA in a statement on Thursday.

“He was single minded at restoring the EPA to its proper statutory authority and ending the burdensome regulations that have stifled economic growth across the country,” he said. “I was pleased to work with him on critical issues, like pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement and prioritizing the cleanup of Superfund sites.“

If Inhofe ultimately decides to retire but backs someone else to succeed him in 2020, Pruitt’s once-clear path to the Senate — and potentially one day the presidency — could be significantly muddied.

Nancy Cook and Anthony Adragna contributed to this report.



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