Scott Pruitt has drawn criticism from environmentalists and other critics for letting prominent GOP backers and industry groups influence the agency's agenda. | J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo Pruitt fast-tracked California cleanup after Hugh Hewitt brokered meeting

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt placed a polluted California area on his personal priority list of Superfund sites targeted for “immediate and intense” action after conservative radio and television host Hugh Hewitt brokered a meeting between him and lawyers for the water district that was seeking federal help to clean up the polluted Orange County site.

The previously unreported meeting, which was documented in emails released by EPA under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Sierra Club, showed Pruitt’s staff reacting quickly to the request last September by Hewitt, who has been one of Pruitt’s staunchest defenders amid a raft of ethics controversies around his expensive travel, security team spending and a cheap Washington condo rental from a lobbyist.


Pruitt has drawn criticism from environmentalists and other critics for letting prominent GOP backers and industry groups influence the agency's agenda — even as he has kicked scientists off of EPA's advisory panels and moved to limit the kinds of peer-reviewed research it will consider when making decisions.



In many cases, the people whose advice Pruitt is heeding could be useful supporters for him in a future race for U.S. senator or president. They include GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson, who — as POLITICO reported in March — persuaded Pruitt last year to take a meeting with an Israeli water purification company called Water-Gen that later won a research deal with the EPA.

Hewitt, a resident of Orange County whose son James works in EPA’s press office, emailed Pruitt in September to set up a meeting between the administrator and the law firm Larson O’Brien, which employs Hewitt and represents the Orange County Water District. Pruitt had been planning to meet with the lawyers in California a month earlier, but cancelled the trip to undergo knee surgery.

“I’ll join if the Administrator would like me too or can catch up later at a dinner,” Hewitt wrote in his Sept. 18 message. Hewitt added that the issues surrounding the Superfund site were “Greek to me but a big deal in my home county.”

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Pruitt’s aides responded within minutes and quickly confirmed an Oct. 18 meeting for the lawyers and a project director.

Six weeks after that meeting, on Dec. 8, the Orange County North Basin site appeared on Pruitt’s list of 21 contaminated areas to address. A month later, Pruitt proposed listing the site on EPA’s National Priorities List, a move that could make it eligible for long-term federal cleanup funding from the federal government if the responsible polluters cannot be identified and forced to pay for its remediation.

Since then, Hewitt has been a robust defender of Pruitt, dismissing his recent controversies as “nonsense scandals” on MSNBC in early April and saying his detractors were “just trying to stop the deregulation effort.”

Pruitt has touted the agency’s Superfund work as one of his key priorities, setting up a task force to seek to speed up the clean-up of the nation’s worst contaminated sites. That task force had been headed by Albert “Kell” Kelly, a former banker and longtime friend, who departed the agency last week after news about loans he provided to Pruitt in Oklahoma, including the mortgage provided to Pruitt for a house he bought from a lobbyist when he was a state senator.

Environmental advocates have worried Pruitt’s efforts to identify Superfund priority sites would bypass the process set up by Congress to ensure cleanup resources are divided fairly, and that he could focus on sites seen as important to his political supporters. And environmentalists have said Pruitt’s rush to claim that contaminated properties have been remediated could risk turning them over to local governments and businesses that might pursue cheaper, inadequate solutions.

Elgie Holstein, senior director for strategic planning at the Environmental Defense Fund who has been tracking EPA’s Superfund actions, said the connection to Hewitt is “not a surprise.”

“The biggest fear we have is that No. 1, the administrator’s political priorities and personal ambitions, political ambitions become the primary criteria for action under this program instead of science and health,” Holstein said.

EPA never disclosed the meeting with Hewitt’s contacts. It was listed on Pruitt’s public calendar as a staff briefing. But on his private Outlook schedule, which the agency has released in response to lawsuits, it appeared as an “Orange County Superfund Site” meeting with Kelly and two other staffers. The records did not list the Californians in attendance at the meeting at EPA headquarters in Washington.

But EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox confirmed that two lawyers representing the water district, Robert O’Brien and Scott Sommer, and the water district director of special projects, Bill Hunt, were there. A third lawyer, former federal Judge Stephen G. Larson, was forced to cancel his trip due to wildfires in California, according to emails.

“Hugh Hewitt helped arrange the meeting at the request of the water district but did not attend,” Wilcox said.

Wilcox said the meeting was for the water district to “brief EPA on the Superfund site’s cleanup efforts and request expedited cleanup,” following a 2016 agreement with the agency to conduct a remedial investigation and feasibility study, at a cost of $4 million over two years. Hunt did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Hewitt in an email to POLITICO called Pruitt a friend and said he does not have a working relationship with him. He said that his firm has represented the water district and worked on the site with EPA’s regional office for years but that he had not participated in that work.

Hewitt said he requested a meeting because the water district wanted to brief the new EPA team, he said, adding that he was an Orange County resident until 2016 as well as an Orange County Children and Families Commission member. He said that he “very much” wanted the Superfund site remediated as soon as possible.

According to an EPA fact sheet, the Orange County site has more than five square miles of polluted groundwater containing chlorinated solvents and other contaminants across the cities of Anaheim, Fullerton, and Placentia. It includes the Orange County Groundwater Basin, which provides drinking water to more than 2.4 million residents across 22 cities, according to the agency. Those pollutants can damage humans’ nervous systems, kidneys and livers, and some are considered carcinogenic.

EPA has just begun its process of studying the contamination and it has not determined which companies caused the pollution in the area. But an administrative settlement with the EPA in 2016 says the area was home to “electronics manufacturing, metals processing, aerospace manufacturing, musical instrument manufacturing, rubber and plastics manufacturing, and dry cleaning.”

Hewitt also thanked EPA schedulers for working to arrange a meeting between Pruitt and the California Lincoln Clubs, which describe themselves as in favor of “limited government, fiscal discipline and personal responsibility.” After some rescheduling Pruitt eventually met with representatives of the group on a trip to California in March of this year, according to his public calendar. Prominent Orange County businessman John Warner also helped to connect that group with staffers.

Pruitt and his scheduling staff have frequently sought to set up meetings with or for influential Republican figures, according to the internal EPA emails.

His team accepted an invitation for him to address The Philanthropy Roundtable at an invitation-only event at the White House for “conservative and free-market foundation CEOs and individual wealth creators to discuss the greatest opportunities for foundations to protect and strengthen free society” and “what [Pruitt] views as unique opportunities for philanthropic action.

As POLITICO reported in March, Pruitt also met with an Indiana coal executive and Trump fundraiser who was seeking to soften a pollution rule.

Pruitt also crafted his travel schedule — including a tour of states in August — to meet with big business much like a member of Congress would during the annual recess.

In July, EPA’s associate administrator of public engagement Tate Bennett was working with Pruitt to “essentially create an August recess for the EPA to be out in the states talking with individual companies & doing listening sessions within sectors,” said Leah Curtsinger, the federal policy director for the Colorado Association of Commerce & Industry, in an email introducing Bennett to her husband, public affairs director at coal company Cloud Peak Energy and a fellow alum of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office.

Annie Snider contributed to this report.