Emails Withheld by Oklahoma AG's Office Made Public as Pruitt Begins Role as Head of EPA
More than 7,500 pages of emails and other records released by the Oklahoma attorney general’s office to the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) reveal a “close and friendly” relationship between the former office held by Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) new administrator, and the fossil fuel industry, the CMD alleged.
The emails were obtained after the Oklahoma County Court last week found Pruitt in violation of the state’s Open Records Act. The CMD sued the attorney general’s office for withholding emails from a records request it filed nearly two years ago.
The CMD said the emails reveal that Pruitt’s office and oil and gas lobby group American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers coordinated opposition in 2013 to the Renewable Fuel Standard Program and ozone limits. They also show a close relationship between Pruitt and oil and gas exploration and production firm Devon Energy, it said.
The CMD noted that the court has ordered the attorney general’s office to turn over an undetermined number of documents dated between November 2015 and August 2016 in response to five additional open records requests by February 27.
Pruitt was sworn in as the EPA’s new administrator on February 17 following the Senate’s 52–46 confirmation vote, mostly along party lines. The vote was held despite pleas by Democrats to delay it until they could view emails associated with the CMD’s records request.
Pruitt’s confirmation was also opposed by former and current EPA staffers, who urged Senators to vote against the official they said had made a career out of fighting the agency.
On February 21, Pruitt told EPA staff in his first address that he sought to “listen, learn, and lead” with input from the agency’s 15,000 workers. “We ought to be able to get together and wrestle through some very difficult issues and do so in a civil manner,” he said.
Pruitt said that “growing the economy” and “protecting the environment” can be achieved simultaneously.
Pruitt also addressed his views about regulation: “Regulations ought to make things regular. Regulators exist to give certainty to those that they regulate. Those that we regulate ought to know what we expect of them, so that they can plan and allocate resources to comply. That’s really the job of the regulator, and the process we engage in.”
He added, “I seek to ensure that we engender the trust of those at the state level, that those at the state level see us as partners and not as adversaries.”
—Sonal Patel, associate editor (@POWERmagazine, @sonalcpatel)