A trove of more than 7,500 emails and other documents were released on Wednesday revealing that President Donald Trump's choice to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) coordinated closely with his state's oil and gas industry while also leading an office responsible for regulating them.
The emails, released by the Oklahoma attorney general's office after losing a two-year legal battle with the Center for Media and Democracy, show that Scott Pruitt worked with energy executives to push back against EPA regulations that were viewed as harmful to their industry.
The records release came mere days after the former Oklahoma attorney general was narrowly confirmed by the Senate and began his new job at the EPA.
SEE ALSO:EPA's Scott Pruitt enters a hotbed of anti-Trump resistance: his own agency“The newly released emails reveal a close and friendly relationship between Scott Pruitt's office and the fossil fuel industry, with frequent meetings, calls, dinners and other events," said Arn Pearson, CMD's general counsel, in a press release.
BREAKING: Previously withheld #Pruitt polluter emails released under court order in CMD lawsuit now up online here. https://t.co/yH878tqDzf
— Exposed by CMD (@prwatch) February 22, 2017
Senators never saw these emails prior to voting on Pruitt's nomination on Feb. 17. Senate Democrats had tried to hold the vote until the documents were released, but were unable to due to the rules for debate that the Senate Republican majority set out.
“There is no valid legal justification for the emails we received last night not being released prior to Pruitt’s confirmation vote other than to evade public scrutiny,” Pearson said.
Environmental Protection Agency employees and environmental activists gather in Chicago to protest the nomination of Scott Pruitt on Feb. 6, 2017.Credit: AP/REX/Shutterstock“There are hundreds of emails between the AG’s office, Devon Energy, and other polluters that Senators should have been permitted to review prior to their vote to assess Pruitt’s ties to the fossil fuel industry.”
Pruitt was confirmed largely along party lines on a 52 to 46 vote, garnering the most "no" votes of any EPA nominee in history.
One Democratic senator who voted against Pruitt, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, said this information should have been available long ago.
"Seeing industry representatives fawning over Pruitt’s efforts to attack the EPA, it’s clear that this information should have been closely examined by the Senate as we considered his nomination to run that agency," Whitehouse said in a statement.
Overall, the emails further support the findings from a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2014 series in the New York Timesthat first revealed Pruitt's ties to the energy industry. For example, on at least one occasion, Pruitt put an energy company's complaint onto state letterhead, making it appear as if it were coming directly from the attorney general.
The more than 6,000 pages of emails show that Pruitt had many interactions with groups linked to Charles G. and David H. Koch, whose fossil fuel businesses and conservative groups have been a major source of funding for Republicans.
The Kochs have long supported groups that question mainstream climate science findings. During his confirmation hearing and subsequent answers to written questions, Pruitt denied that global warming is a hoax but questioned whether human emissions of greenhouse gases were the main cause of such warming.
One email, sent to Pruitt by Matt Ball of the Koch-funded group Americans for Prosperity, thanked him for his work fighting the Obama administration's EPA.
“Thank you to your respective bosses and all they are doing to push back against President Obama’s EPA and its axis with liberal environmental groups to increase energy costs for Oklahomans and American families across the states,” the email stated. “You both work for true champions of freedom and liberty!” the email said, according to the Times.
Pruitt, as Oklahoma's attorney general, sued the EPA more than a dozen times, including in opposition to the agency's landmark greenhouse gas emissions regulations known as the Clean Power Plan. On Tuesday, Pruitt's name was removed from that lawsuit, due to the difficulties involved with suing oneself.
It is expected that Pruitt, along with the White House, will soon begin trying to dismantle those rules from his new perch atop the environmental agency.
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