EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt allegedly sent only one email to people outside the agency, Politico reported Friday, prompting activists to speculate if he is deleting correspondence.
The agency claimed Pruitt held discussions in private, but his critics are suspicious, especially given the wave of investigations Pruitt has undergone. Activists were less curious about the nature of thousands of records that went missing in 2014 during the Obama administration.
Oversight groups said it seems implausible that someone as active as Pruitt would have sent a single email to outside sources. Records also show evidence Pruitt used text messages to set up a meeting with an Oklahoma lawyer.
“The emails, if they exist, could show what these people want and then those emails could be compared to what the EPA does,” Melanie Sloan, a senior adviser at the watchdog group American Oversight, told Politico. “Americans should know what the EPA is doing, why it’s doing it and who’s influencing those decisions.”
The fact that previously released EPA documents show lobbyists helped plan Pruitt’s international travels makes the gap in Pruitt’s communications significant, Sloan added. Other activists shared similar complaints.
“When you’re a Cabinet secretary, you have enough people around you to send the emails, and you’re pretty busy,” she said. “On the other hand, I get the feeling Scott Pruitt likes to hide what he’s doing even from top staff, which would mean he’d be likely to correspond on his own.”
Concerns related to Pruitt’s alleged missing text messages and emails come amid previous reports in 2014 suggesting elements within Obama’s administration were guilty of similar infractions. (RELATED: Lawmakers Go After EPA Chief’s Deleted Text Messages)
The Department of Justice admitted in court in 2014 that the EPA “misplaced” text messages from former agency administrator Gina McCarthy and other top officials. Republicans argued the agency is violating its own record-keeping guidelines.
EPA texts were being sought by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank. CEI sued the EPA for texts from the phones of McCarthy and former administrator Lisa Jackson.
News that EPA “misplaced” 5,000 text messages came after McCarthy told lawmakers earlier in 2014 she was having trouble accessing her text messages because of a hardware malfunction. The agency argued earlier in 2014 that it had no legal obligation to preserve officials’ text messages because they were personal and not related to federal business — even though they were on government-issued devices.
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