The White House is not washing its hands of Scott Pruitt, even as the slow drip of damaging headlines about the EPA chief continues.

One senior administration official told POLITICO on Friday that the White House still stands behind the Environmental Protection Agency leader despite news reports that he spent months renting a room last year in a condo connected to an energy lobbyist — paying just $50 per night to lodge a block from the Capitol. The news followed months of negative headlines about Pruitt’s first-class travel, security costs and political ambitions that are one of Washington’s worst-kept open secrets.


Pruitt's daughter McKenna also lived in a second room in the condo when she was a White House intern, ABC News reported Friday, raising further questions about whether the rent deal was an unethical favor.

But Pruitt has also been one of the most effective members of President Donald Trump’s administration — moving to reverse a huge swath of Obama-era regulations, persuading the president to exit the Paris climate deal and promoting Trump’s efforts to produce more coal, oil and natural gas.

And unlike other Cabinet members who have gotten the ax from Trump, such as ousted Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Pruitt has not obstructed the president’s conservative agenda or actively criticized his leadership. Instead, he praises Trump on Fox News and elsewhere every chance he gets.

“I confess the optics aren’t ideal, and it probably does not show the best judgment,” the senior administration official said of Pruitt’s former living arrangement. “But Scott Pruitt is always going to receive extra scrutiny since he’s so focused on enacting the Trump agenda.”

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Pruitt’s outside defenders note that he’s different from the other Cabinet officials who have gotten the boot.

“What Pruitt has going for him that Shulkin and a couple of the others did not is he is at one of the key positions for achieving Trump’s agenda, and so far he’s doing a great job,” said Myron Ebell, the energy director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the head of Trump’s EPA transition team.

Of course, such decisions are ultimately up to Trump, who is known to shift his feelings about his personnel rapidly even after publicly supporting them.

Some observers held their breath after Democrats in January released audio from early 2016, when Pruitt worked for Jeb Bush’s campaign, in which Pruitt said Trump would be “more abusive to the Constitution than Barack Obama.” But it’s not clear Trump ever heard about the comments, and Pruitt quickly issued a statement praising Trump as “the most consequential leader of our time.”

Pruitt is also pushing back on the reports about his luxe travel spending and other controversies, telling a St. Louis radio station last week that he is “a little bit dumbfounded by the kind of media narratives.” And outlets including Fox News have recently reported on EPA-provided details about travel spending by Pruitt’s Democratic predecessors.

The damaging leaks have come at the same time that Pruitt has told friends and associates that he’s interested in replacing another embattled Cabinet member, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, should Trump desire to make a change.

Nonetheless, anti-Pruitt activists are sensing a possible turning point with the latest revelations about Pruitt’s $50-a-night lease in a condo part-owned by health care lobbyist Vicki Hart, the wife of J. Steven Hart, an energy lobbyist who also served as head of Trump’s Labor Department transition team. Hart said he is a “casual friend“ of Pruitt, to whose campaigns for attorney general he gave a total of $1,750 between 2010 and 2012.

ABC News, which first reported the living arrangements Thursday, followed up Friday with new revelations that Pruitt’s daughter had for a time lived in another room of the condo with him and that Pruitt’s round-the-clock security detail had to break into the building at one point when it feared the administrator may have been unconscious.

In a statement to POLITICO, Hart denied that his relationship with Pruitt was untoward.

"I am an Oklahoman. Pruitt is a casual friend but I have had no contact with him for many months except for a brief pass by at the National Prayer Breakfast in 2018," Hart said Thursday. He added: "I have no ownership interest in the property despite suggestions to the contrary in the ABC News report. Pruitt paid all rent owed as agreed to in the lease."

Justina Fugh, a career ethics official at EPA, told POLITICO that the arrangement did not violate any gift or lobbying laws because of a prior friendship between Pruitt and Hart that would fall under an exception for transactions with friends. She also cited Pruitt’s boarding payments, which Fugh said seemed reasonable.

“Just because a person gave money in the past does not mean that somehow that relationship is tainted going forward," she said Friday morning.

Asked if she had inquired about where Pruitt is living now, Fugh laughed.

“I don’t go around looking at where people are living or how they’re living,” she said. "I'm not even curious to know. I'm really flabbergasted you'd even say that. … That just isn't what we do."

EPA on Friday evening released a memo from Kevin Minoli, a career official who serves as EPA’s top ethics expert, clearing Pruitt's lease of any ethical concerns.

Minoli wrote that the lease was a "reasonable market value," and said it authorized Pruitt's immediate family to stay there was well, which they did on unspecified occasions.

Vicki Hart told ABC on Friday that the agreement was with the administrator only. “If other people were using the bedroom or the living quarters, I was never told, and I never gave him permission to do that,” she said.

Outside watchdogs are much more concerned about Pruitt's use of the lobbyist-owned condo.

“This was not Airbnb. This was not listed on Airbnb. You and I could not have stayed there,” said Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen. “It was set aside specifically for Pruitt — at a rent that is about half mine, and I suspect a considerably nicer place than mine.”

Public Citizen on Thursday night formally asked EPA’s inspector general to review the matter.

EPA’s IG — who warned the White House last year that his current budget will limit the number of investigations his office can carry out — is already reviewing Pruitt’s 2017 travel, as well as the installation of a pricey, secure phone booth in his office. A spokesman for the IG’s office said it was aware of Pruitt’s living arrangement but declined to comment further.

The rental arrangement has also come to the attention of local authorities. The District of Columbia Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs said on Twitter that it will "conduct an investigation" into whether the condo owners were licensed for such night-by-night operations.

Pruitt ultimately spent $6,100 on those accommodations, according to Bloomberg, which was shown Pruitt’s canceled checks by EPA.

Environmentalists declared outright war on Pruitt earlier this week, launching a “#BootPruitt” campaign to have him fired. The campaign is aimed both at the president and at Pruitt’s home state of Oklahoma, where he is widely expected to run in 2020 to replace Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe, who will be 85 on election day in 2020.

"By now, it is clear that Pruitt is unfit for public office and needs to go," John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed.

That was before the allegations about avocado-omelet breakfasts cooked by his daughter in a condo where they rented rooms from the wife of an energy lobbyist. His critics’ rhetoric has only grown since.

“It looks like Scott Pruitt worked all day to benefit major energy companies, then went to be bed courtesy of a sweetheart real estate deal from lobbyists,” said Jeremy Symons of the Environmental Defense Fund. “This is the kind of behavior — grabbing personal benefits from lobbyists and taxpayers — that President Trump promised to fight. Scott Pruitt is demonstrating just how brazen a lie that has become.

And on Friday, Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) called on Pruitt to resign.

Such left-wing attacks are only strengthening Pruitt’s credibility among the most important voters in Oklahoma, said Oklahoma GOP political strategist Pat McFerron.

“Every time he’s attacked by the Washington Post or The New York Times, that helps him in a Republican primary in Oklahoma,” he said.

The condo isn’t the first time Pruitt has seen his official business as administrator coincide with politically connected individuals.

Last spring, for example, Pruitt met with executives from an Israeli company at the request of Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson. EPA subsequently entered into a research partnership with the company over its water generation technology.

Pruitt also sat down last year with Steven Chancellor, a coal executive who is also a well-connected Indiana Republican and powerhouse GOP fundraiser.

Meanwhile, an introductory tour last year had Pruitt crisscross the nation — mostly to states won by Trump. His schedule reflects appearances before the Federalist Society, an influential group for conservative legal and judicial officials, as well as groups that traditionally have little to do with environmental policy, like the Family Research Council. Meeting with those groups helps boost Pruitt’s conservative profile and lets him network with activists who could help a future campaign.

Nancy Cook contributed to this report.