Executive Departments Part 2

[AmazonGrace]

 I am a tad obsessed with this, it's just so morbidly fascinating that all this is out in the open and they're getting away with it

[onekidanddone]

58 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

I am a tad obsessed with this, it's just so morbidly fascinating that all this is out in the open and they're getting away with it

I am as well. I just want to be able to yell Wheels UP.  What the fuck is taking so long?

[onekidanddone]

Yea, this work for Sir Pruitt.

He likes to have a good time and he doesn't care who gets hurt.

 

[onekidanddone]

On 4/1/2018 at 10:58 AM, Howl said:

And it gets worse, much worse, with the appointment of Robert Redfield to head the CDC.  This piece from Foreign Policy Web site sums up  horribleness that is Redfield's career and his HIV and AIDS policies. 

Meet Trump’s New, Homophobic Public Health Quack

I'll have to research this further to find out why. That being said, I don't see the new head of the CDC giving two fucks

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

This is the Purge 

 

[AmazonGrace]

Is Bolton the only one there yet?

[AmazonGrace]

Good grief.

 

[AmazonGrace]

Are you ready? Hey, are you ready for this?
Are you hanging on the edge of your seat?
Out of the doorway the bullets rip
To the sound of the beat, yeah....

 

[onekidanddone]

13 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

Are you ready? Hey, are you ready for this?
Are you hanging on the edge of your seat?
Out of the doorway the bullets rip
To the sound of the beat, yeah....

 

Hurricane Bolton has made landfall 

[AmazonGrace]

Pompeo got whatever Sessions has. 

 

[JMarie]

Classy.  That's the only word I can think of.

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2018/04/12/interior-department-spokeswoman-calls-cnn-reporter-a-fking-idiot-for-doing-her-job/23409700/

Quote

WASHINGTON — The lead spokesperson for the Interior Department labeled a CNN reporter with a vulgar insult after being pressed to answer questions about Secretary Ryan Zinke’s travel, emails released as part of a public records request show. 

“Rene is a f**king idiot,” agency spokeswoman Heather Swift wrote to one of her colleagues, referring to CNN correspondent Rene Marsh.

“She sounds like one,” responded deputy director of communications Russell Newell.

The insult stemmed from an Oct. 3 inquiry in which Marsh asked the agency’s press team several follow-up questions about Zinke’s trip in June to Las Vegas, where he met with the Vegas Golden Knights hockey team, and other taxpayer-funded flights. Swift promptly replied to say that she was “checking into this.”  

The following day, Marsh emailed again to ask when she could expect a response. Swift didn’t answer, prompting Marsh to follow up again on Oct. 5. Swift told her that she was “working on it” but that “the person who handles the Secretary’s travel is currently out of the office so it’s taking a little longer than usual.”

On Oct. 6, Marsh sent two more emails to the agency’s press team. In the second she wrote: “We have repeatedly asked the press office for answers to the below questions and for 4 days now we have been told you are working on it and today we’ve received no response at all. We are asking questions that the public has every right to know as these are their tax dollars and for Interior not answer any of the below questions is really hard to understand. Is the DOI issuing a no comment on all of the below questions?”

Interior finally sent a response that evening but failed to answer several of Marsh’s specific questions. Emails show that Marsh again insisted that the Department of the Interior provide answers. 

Later that evening, Newell emailed his colleague Swift a draft of an email he was considering sending to Marsh in which he planned to question the reporter about whether she’d asked previous interior secretaries such questions.

“I was about to send this to Rene but I’ll send to you instead and maybe it will make me feel better,” Newell wrote to Swift. “Just had to get it off my chest. The double standard is nauseating.” 

On Oct. 12, Marsh co-authored an article for CNN headlined “Zinke’s Travel Continues to Raise Ethical Questions.”

The Department of the Interior and Marsh did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment. 

The Vegas trip is among those that have come under scrutiny. On June 26, Zinke and several staffers chartered an oil company plane for a flight from Las Vegas to Montana, costing taxpayers $12,375, as Politico first reported.

Zinke’s use of private planes at taxpayers’ expense — a controversy he’s shrugged off as “a little BS” — is being investigated by the Interior Department’s Office of the Inspector General. The watchdog office is expected to release its final reportnext week, according to CNN.

Additionally, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel is investigating Zinke’s speech to the Vegas hockey team, which is owned by Bill Foley, a donor of Zinke’s congressional campaigns.

screenshot of the email is in the article

[GreyhoundFan]

Sigh: "Senate confirms a former coal lobbyist as Scott Pruitt’s second-in-command at EPA"

Spoiler

If embattled Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt were to leave office, the reins of the agency could fall to a former Senate aide and coal mining lobbyist who was confirmed 53-45 Thursday afternoon to become second-in-command at EPA.

Andrew Wheeler worked at the EPA more than two decades ago and later served as an adviser to Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), a high-profile critic of climate science who famously brought a snowball to the Senate floor as a prop. For the past nine years, Wheeler has been a lobbyist for a variety of companies, including Appalachian coal mining firm Murray Energy.

President Trump nominated Wheeler for the deputy administrator job last fall, but only this week did his nomination finally arrive on the Senate floor for a vote. Confirmation appears likely by the end of the week.

Wheeler, who works for the lobbying firm FaegreBD Consulting, received $370,000 in fees last year from Murray Energy. Murray has paid Wheeler’s firms $225,000 to $559,000 over the past nine years.

In March 2017, shortly after working for the Trump transition team, Wheeler attended a meeting between Murray’s chief executive Robert Murray and then-newly confirmed Energy Secretary Rick Perry. Murray asked Perry to increase payments to coal and nuclear plants supplying electricity to the Midwest and Appalachia. Perry tried to implement such a plan, but independent electricity regulators rejected it.

Environmental groups have sharply criticized the notion of installing Wheeler at the EPA in any capacity. But in recent days, as Pruitt has faced scrutiny over allegations of wasteful spending and unusual management of the agency, attention has turned to the prospect that Wheeler could end up in charge of EPA.

“It is critically important that the public understand Wheeler’s career as a lobbyist for some of the worst actors in the energy industry,” Keith Gaby, a spokesman for the Environmental Defense Fund, said in an email this week. “Andrew Wheeler running EPA would go far beyond having an administrator overly influenced by lobbyists — the head of EPA would be an energy industry lobbyist.”

“The mission of the EPA is to protect human health and the environment, but Andrew Wheeler has dedicated his career to weakening environmental protections, serving as a lobbyist for numerous fossil fuel clients, including one of our country’s biggest polluters, Murray Energy,” Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters, said in an open letter to members of the Senate. “Andrew Wheeler’s inherent conflicts of interest from his long history of ties to the fossil fuel industry make him an entirely inappropriate choice for EPA’s number two leadership role.”

Members of the EPA and others have said that Wheeler worked closely with industry even when he was working for Inhofe, who was then chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Karpinski pointed to a measure known as the Clean Skies Act which would have undermined the landmark Clean Air Act. Inhofe was a vocal critic of climate change, which he said was “the greatest hoax” ever foisted on U.S. citizens.

On Thursday, Wheeler’s former boss praised him on the Senate floor. Inhofe called Wheeler “a wonderful guy, and I would like to find anyone who knows him well to say there is any flaw in his character. He’s going to do a great job.”

Myron Ebell, a senior fellow at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute who headed Trump’s EPA transition team and is a climate skeptic, described Wheeler in a statement as levelheaded and effective.

“He has the experience and the expertise necessary to manage the agency and to make sure that the reforms undertaken by Administrator Pruitt will be fully implemented,” Ebell said. “[His]experience in how the EPA operates and his commitment to President Trump’s agenda to undo the regulatory onslaught of the previous administration will be valuable to his work managing and reforming the agency.”

Wheeler spent four years as a career employee at the EPA under President George H.W. Bush and President Bill Clinton before moving to the Hill.

After leaving the Senate staff, Wheeler received lobbying fees from a variety of clients. Last year he received $40,000 from Energy Fuels Resources Inc., $20,000 from Underwriters Laboratories and $60,000 from Sargento Foods in addition to Murray.

During the 2016 campaign, Wheeler volunteered to consult on energy and environmental policy for the campaign of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

Wheeler wrote a post on his personal Facebook account the day before Super Tuesday pleading with those considering voting for Trump to reconsider. In his six-point critique, Wheeler questioned Trump’s character, business acumen and viability as a general-election candidate. Trump was a “bully,” Wheeler wrote in the since-deleted Facebook post obtained by The Post. He said that Trump “hasn’t been that successful” in business and “has more baggage then all of the other Republican candidates combined.” Wheeler added that Trump “has demonstrated through the debates and interviews that he doesn’t understand how the government works.”

But Wheeler has changed his tune.

“I was just looking at the debates and what I saw on the news, and I hadn’t focused on what he was saying,” Wheeler told The Post in October, “and when I started looking into what he was saying and what his campaign and what his candidacy was about, I was fully on board.”

Given Trump’s agenda for rolling back a broad array of EPA rules, that won’t assuage environmental and Democratic critics.

“Mr. Wheeler — not atypical of this administration, not atypical of the dense swamp that they’ve made a whole lot worse — is a former industry lobbyist who has worked on behalf of big polluters and climate change deniers,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) said on the Senate floor April 9. “He has spent years working to undermine or lobby against the environmental protections he may soon oversee. As a lobbyist, he helped raise money for a few Republican Senators who sit on the committee that recently approved his nomination.”

Three Democrats voted for Wheeler, all from coal states. They included Sens Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), Joe Manchin III (W.Vir.) and Joe Donnelly (Ind.).

Lukas Ross, climate and energy campaigner at the advocacy group Friends of the Earth, said in a statement that Wheeler would almost certainly carry out the regulatory rollbacks started under Pruitt.

“Andrew Wheeler is Big Oil’s backup plan in case Scott Pruitt’s corruption finally finishes him,” Ross said. “As Scott Pruitt stumbles from scandal to scandal, there is nothing more dangerous than a dirty energy lobbyist waiting in the wings to become acting Administrator.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Scott Pruitt has four different EPA email addresses. Lawmakers want to know why."

Spoiler

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has used four separate agency email addresses since taking office, according to Senate Democrats and an EPA official, prompting concerns among agency lawyers that the EPA has not disclosed all the documents it would normally release to the public under federal records requests.

Two Democrats on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee — Jeff Merkley (Ore.) and Tom Carper (Del.) — sent a letter Tuesday to the EPA’s inspector general asking the office to probe the matter.

“We write to share our deep concern over Administrator Pruitt’s reported use of multiple email accounts,” they wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The Washington Post. “It is imperative that there be an investigation into whether the agency has properly searched these email addresses for responsive documents in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.”

Pruitt’s four email addresses include one in the conventional agency format, pruitt.scott@epa.gov, as well as three others: esp7@epa.gov, adm14pruitt@epa.gov and sooners7@epa.gov, an apparent reference to the University of Oklahoma, whose football team Pruitt follows closely.

Another EPA staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation, said that Pruitt’s use of different emails has raised concern among agency lawyers responsible for scouring the administrator’s official correspondence in the course of responding to FOIA requests from journalists and outside groups. If there is an email account that was not searched for records in response to a FOIA inquiry, the official said, that “would be an enormous breach of the public trust.”

In an email Thursday, EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox said the agency had fully complied with any public records requests.

“The EPA maintains three email accounts which are attributed to Administrator Pruitt: two are used by staff for calendaring and public correspondence; the third is used by the Administrator,” Wilcox said. “A fourth email account was created for use by the Administrator but was superseded and never used beyond three test emails. When we receive a FOIA request all accounts are searched before we respond to the FOIA request.”

The agency has seen a sharp rise in the number of public records requests since Pruitt joined President Trump’s Cabinet. It received 11,493 requests under FOIA in fiscal 2017, according to officials, 995 more than the previous year. In November, Pruitt said his staff has focused on eliminating the backlog of records requests filed during the Obama administration over responding to more recent requests.

Pruitt’s office said it is looking into the matter and will provide a comment later. A spokeswoman for EPA Inspector General Arthur A. Elkins Jr. declined to comment on the senator’s request for audit.

Pruitt isn’t the first EPA chief to faced questions over email use.

During President Barack Obama’s first term, then-EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson came under fire for maintaining a separate agency email under the alias “Richard Windsor” — a name that derived from Jackson’s family dog when she lived in East Windsor Township, N.J.

At the time, EPA officials said the agency was not trying to be deceptive in giving Jackson an alternate email address to use. Rather, they said the intent was for her to be able to communicate with other government officials without having to wade through the sea of emails that arrived in her public email, Jackson.lisap@epa.gov — an account the agency said received 1.5 million emails during fiscal year 2012.

They said that administrators since the Clinton administration had followed the practice of having multiple email addresses, writing to lawmakers that for “nearly two decades EPA administrators have managed the agency with two email accounts.”

“We welcome an investigation into this,” an EPA spokeswoman said at the time. “We don’t have anything to hide.”

But disclosure of the account and the unusual name used by Jackson prompted congressional Republicans to request an investigation into the practice. The EPA’s inspector general undertook an audit “to determine whether EPA follows applicable laws and regulations when using private and alias email accounts to conduct official business.”

If Pruitt’s office has been using all four addresses mentioned in the letter, the practice is likely to raise similar questions about whether the EPA chief is trying to skirt public records requests into his correspondence.

Pruitt encountered criticism over allegedly using a private email address in his previous job as Oklahoma attorney general.

During his confirmation hearing early last year, Pruitt said he never used a personal email account for official business as Oklahoma state attorney general. Asked whether he had ever used a private email account while on the job, Pruitt told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee: “I use only my official OAG [office of the attorney general] email address and government-issued phone to conduct official business.”

But several of Pruitt’s official emails, released soon after as part of an open records lawsuit in Oklahoma, were copied to his personal email — an Apple account that was partially blacked out before being released.

The emails copied to Pruitt’s personal account included ones from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate-backed group that focuses on state legislatures; the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, which has substantial interests in EPA issues; and members of Pruitt’s staff.

A Pruitt spokesman at the time told an Oklahoma Fox News affiliate that officials at the attorney general’s office conducted a search of Pruitt’s personal email account and did not find any relevant documents that had not been produced in the search of his official email accounts.

I'm surprised one of them isn't chief_shady@... And, what's this about him using a personal email account?

[GreyhoundFan]

You couldn't make this up: "Scott Pruitt’s Idea to Update an E.P.A. Keepsake: Less E.P.A., More Pruitt"

Spoiler

When Scott Pruitt wanted to refashion the Environmental Protection Agency’s “challenge coin” — a type of souvenir medallion with military origins that has become a status symbol among civilians — he proposed an unusual design: Make it bigger, and delete the E.P.A. logo.

Mr. Pruitt instead wanted the coin to feature some combination of symbols more reflective of himself and the Trump administration. Among the possibilities: a buffalo, to evoke Mr. Pruitt’s native Oklahoma, and a Bible verse to reflect his faith.

Other ideas included using the Great Seal of the United States — a design similar to the presidential seal — and putting Mr. Pruitt’s name around the rim in large letters, according to Ronald Slotkin, a career E.P.A. employee who retired this year, and two people familiar with the proposals who asked to remain anonymous because they said they feared retribution.

Many agencies have challenge coins to hand out as gifts to employees or guests. The name comes from a military tradition of carrying a coin stamped with an insignia to prove one’s affiliation, if challenged.

Mr. Pruitt’s numismatic preferences, laid out last year during his first few months at the agency, raised concerns among senior agency officials, according to Mr. Slotkin and the others. Over the course of several months of discussions, they said, staff members expressed worries that his proposals would cost too much, and that dropping the agency’s seal — a stylized flower — would be a breach of protocol. They urged Mr. Pruitt to consider more modest designs and to drop his objection to the seal.

Mr. Slotkin said the proposals appeared to refashion the coin into a keepsake embodying Mr. Pruitt, as opposed to the E.P.A.

“These coins represent the agency,” said Mr. Slotkin, who served as the director of the E.P.A.’s multimedia office. “But Pruitt wanted his coin to be bigger than everyone else’s and he wanted it in a way that represented him.”

Mr. Slotkin said that during the design discussion, in which he participated, Mr. Pruitt wanted to remove “anything to do with E.P.A.” The changes, he said, would have turned it into a “Pruitt coin.”

A spokesman for the E.P.A., Jahan Wilcox, said the agency never ordered challenge coins.

Another person who was involved in the debate said that Mr. Pruitt had expressed disapproval of the agency’s seal, a round flower with four leaves. He felt it looked like a marijuana leaf.

Mr. Pruitt also requested that the agency order other items — including leather-bound notebooks, fountain pens and stationery — from which he wanted to omit the E.P.A. seal and upon which he wanted to feature his name prominently, according to Mr. Slotkin and the person who participated in the discussions about the seal. Ultimately, the items retained a small version of the seal, according to several people familiar with the orders.

The debate over souvenirs came as Mr. Pruitt was engaged in personal and public spending that has since become the subject of scrutiny, threatening his tenure at the E.P.A.

Mr. Pruitt has been under fire for renting a condominium for $50 a night from the wife of a lobbyist with business before his agency, as well as for his spending of taxpayer dollars on first-class travel, which he has asserted was necessary for security reasons.

In an interview with The Washington Examiner this month, Mr. Pruitt said he was under attack because he has been effective in enacting President Trump’s regulatory overhaul agenda and opponents would like to stop him. “And do I think that they will resort to anything to achieve that?” he said. “Yes.”

Mr. Trump defended Mr. Pruitt in a weekend Twitter message: “While Security spending was somewhat more than his predecessor, Scott Pruitt has received death threats because of his bold actions at E.P.A. Record clean Air & Water while saving U.S.A. Billions of Dollars. Rent was about market rate, travel expenses O.K. Scott is doing a great job!”

Some critics of Mr. Pruitt’s coin proposal said it missed the point of the gift item. Scott H. Amey, general counsel of the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group, said that the coins were intended to honor jobs well done and lift morale. “The coin should reference the E.P.A., and not become tribute to Pruitt or Oklahoma,” he said.

While the origins of the silver-dollar-sized coins are military — they have typically been given by commanders to recognize outstanding service — today they can be found everywhere. Eric Perez, who manages Lapel Pins Plus Network in Florida, a challenge-coin maker, said these days he creates coins “for everyone, from government agencies down to mom-and-pop stores and everything in between.”

Currently, he said, the company is designing a separate E.P.A. challenge coin to be given to emergency workers who responded to last year’s hurricanes and wildfires. The coin, Mr. Perez said, is similar to one the company designed for a division of the E.P.A. a few years ago that depicted emergency responders on one side and the agency symbol and division name on the other.

The main design of the current E.P.A. challenge coin was conceived under President Barack Obama’s first administrator, Lisa P. Jackson. One side bears the agency seal with her signature underneath and her name stamped along the rim. The other side has an image of outstretched hands holding up the earth.

The cost of the coins ranges roughly from $3 to $6 apiece (not including the molds) depending on size, thickness, design and number of coins produced, according to Mary Harms, the owner of Challenge Design, a company that makes challenge coins for the White House Military Office.

Mr. Slotkin, along with one of the people familiar with the initial discussions and who requested anonymity, said Mr. Pruitt wanted his coin to be about twice as large as the current one while featuring images of more personal relevance, such as the buffalo. Mr. Slotkin said that, when he asked Mr. Pruitt’s aides, why put a buffalo on the coin, they answered, “But he’s from Oklahoma.”

“At one point he wanted a Bible verse, but staff talked him out of it,” Mr. Slotkin said. He said he did not recall which verse had been considered.

Asked about the details of the E.P.A.’s coin redesign, Mr. Wilcox, the E.P.A. spokesman, said in a statement: “Administrator Pruitt does not have a challenge coin.”

Other agencies have made changes to their own challenge coins. Ryan Zinke, the interior secretary, issued coins last year that display the United States seal on one side and his agency’s logo, a buffalo on a prairie with mountains and a rising sun, on the other. Mr. Zinke’s name is stamped around the rim. Earlier Interior Department challenge coins did not bear the secretary’s name.

Mr. Trump also has remade the presidential challenge coins, substituting his campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” for the national motto, e pluribus unum.

 

[Cartmann99]

18 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

You couldn't make this up: "Scott Pruitt’s Idea to Update an E.P.A. Keepsake: Less E.P.A., More Pruitt"

  Reveal hidden contents

When Scott Pruitt wanted to refashion the Environmental Protection Agency’s “challenge coin” — a type of souvenir medallion with military origins that has become a status symbol among civilians — he proposed an unusual design: Make it bigger, and delete the E.P.A. logo.

Mr. Pruitt instead wanted the coin to feature some combination of symbols more reflective of himself and the Trump administration. Among the possibilities: a buffalo, to evoke Mr. Pruitt’s native Oklahoma, and a Bible verse to reflect his faith.

Other ideas included using the Great Seal of the United States — a design similar to the presidential seal — and putting Mr. Pruitt’s name around the rim in large letters, according to Ronald Slotkin, a career E.P.A. employee who retired this year, and two people familiar with the proposals who asked to remain anonymous because they said they feared retribution.

Many agencies have challenge coins to hand out as gifts to employees or guests. The name comes from a military tradition of carrying a coin stamped with an insignia to prove one’s affiliation, if challenged.

Mr. Pruitt’s numismatic preferences, laid out last year during his first few months at the agency, raised concerns among senior agency officials, according to Mr. Slotkin and the others. Over the course of several months of discussions, they said, staff members expressed worries that his proposals would cost too much, and that dropping the agency’s seal — a stylized flower — would be a breach of protocol. They urged Mr. Pruitt to consider more modest designs and to drop his objection to the seal.

Mr. Slotkin said the proposals appeared to refashion the coin into a keepsake embodying Mr. Pruitt, as opposed to the E.P.A.

“These coins represent the agency,” said Mr. Slotkin, who served as the director of the E.P.A.’s multimedia office. “But Pruitt wanted his coin to be bigger than everyone else’s and he wanted it in a way that represented him.”

Mr. Slotkin said that during the design discussion, in which he participated, Mr. Pruitt wanted to remove “anything to do with E.P.A.” The changes, he said, would have turned it into a “Pruitt coin.”

A spokesman for the E.P.A., Jahan Wilcox, said the agency never ordered challenge coins.

Another person who was involved in the debate said that Mr. Pruitt had expressed disapproval of the agency’s seal, a round flower with four leaves. He felt it looked like a marijuana leaf.

Mr. Pruitt also requested that the agency order other items — including leather-bound notebooks, fountain pens and stationery — from which he wanted to omit the E.P.A. seal and upon which he wanted to feature his name prominently, according to Mr. Slotkin and the person who participated in the discussions about the seal. Ultimately, the items retained a small version of the seal, according to several people familiar with the orders.

The debate over souvenirs came as Mr. Pruitt was engaged in personal and public spending that has since become the subject of scrutiny, threatening his tenure at the E.P.A.

Mr. Pruitt has been under fire for renting a condominium for $50 a night from the wife of a lobbyist with business before his agency, as well as for his spending of taxpayer dollars on first-class travel, which he has asserted was necessary for security reasons.

In an interview with The Washington Examiner this month, Mr. Pruitt said he was under attack because he has been effective in enacting President Trump’s regulatory overhaul agenda and opponents would like to stop him. “And do I think that they will resort to anything to achieve that?” he said. “Yes.”

Mr. Trump defended Mr. Pruitt in a weekend Twitter message: “While Security spending was somewhat more than his predecessor, Scott Pruitt has received death threats because of his bold actions at E.P.A. Record clean Air & Water while saving U.S.A. Billions of Dollars. Rent was about market rate, travel expenses O.K. Scott is doing a great job!”

Some critics of Mr. Pruitt’s coin proposal said it missed the point of the gift item. Scott H. Amey, general counsel of the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group, said that the coins were intended to honor jobs well done and lift morale. “The coin should reference the E.P.A., and not become tribute to Pruitt or Oklahoma,” he said.

While the origins of the silver-dollar-sized coins are military — they have typically been given by commanders to recognize outstanding service — today they can be found everywhere. Eric Perez, who manages Lapel Pins Plus Network in Florida, a challenge-coin maker, said these days he creates coins “for everyone, from government agencies down to mom-and-pop stores and everything in between.”

Currently, he said, the company is designing a separate E.P.A. challenge coin to be given to emergency workers who responded to last year’s hurricanes and wildfires. The coin, Mr. Perez said, is similar to one the company designed for a division of the E.P.A. a few years ago that depicted emergency responders on one side and the agency symbol and division name on the other.

The main design of the current E.P.A. challenge coin was conceived under President Barack Obama’s first administrator, Lisa P. Jackson. One side bears the agency seal with her signature underneath and her name stamped along the rim. The other side has an image of outstretched hands holding up the earth.

The cost of the coins ranges roughly from $3 to $6 apiece (not including the molds) depending on size, thickness, design and number of coins produced, according to Mary Harms, the owner of Challenge Design, a company that makes challenge coins for the White House Military Office.

Mr. Slotkin, along with one of the people familiar with the initial discussions and who requested anonymity, said Mr. Pruitt wanted his coin to be about twice as large as the current one while featuring images of more personal relevance, such as the buffalo. Mr. Slotkin said that, when he asked Mr. Pruitt’s aides, why put a buffalo on the coin, they answered, “But he’s from Oklahoma.”

“At one point he wanted a Bible verse, but staff talked him out of it,” Mr. Slotkin said. He said he did not recall which verse had been considered.

Asked about the details of the E.P.A.’s coin redesign, Mr. Wilcox, the E.P.A. spokesman, said in a statement: “Administrator Pruitt does not have a challenge coin.”

Other agencies have made changes to their own challenge coins. Ryan Zinke, the interior secretary, issued coins last year that display the United States seal on one side and his agency’s logo, a buffalo on a prairie with mountains and a rising sun, on the other. Mr. Zinke’s name is stamped around the rim. Earlier Interior Department challenge coins did not bear the secretary’s name.

Mr. Trump also has remade the presidential challenge coins, substituting his campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” for the national motto, e pluribus unum.

 

While reading this article, I kept thinking about this old British detective show I watched a few weeks back. In solving the mystery, we found out that one of the characters wasn't actually a gentleman. He did genealogical research to find a distinguished family whose line had died out, found a way to add his name to the church's baptismal records of that family, and then moved to another part of England to pretend to be the last surviving member of that line.

What I'm trying to say, is that it we could figure out a way to convince Queen Elizabeth to knight him, but tell him that he has to resign from the EPA in order to accept the honor, I think we could be rid of this status-seeking jackass. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Pruitt's security chief goaded spending, employees say"

Spoiler

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has had a willing partner in pushing for his massive spending on bodyguards and first-class flights, current and former EPA officials say — the Secret Service veteran who heads his security detail.

Pasquale “Nino” Perrotta played a key role in the investigation into mobster John "Junior" Gotti in the 1990s, and he’s boasted of his exploits with women, firearms and luxury watches in a self-published autobiography. Now he’s running security for the nation’s top environmental regulator like a lavishly funded SWAT team, according to interviews with seven people who have worked with him under both the Trump and Obama administrations.

The current and former staffers say that rather than acting as a restraint on Pruitt, who came into the agency a year ago demanding round-the-clock bodyguards, Perrotta has instead egged him on — indulging his requests for a 19-person security detail, high-performance SUV, $43,000 soundproof booth and bug-sweep of his offices, as well as first-class flights to limit his exposure to potential threats from fellow passengers. Perrotta has even barred all but a select group of agency employees from entering rooms and corridors near Pruitt’s offices, according to Ron Slotkin, a career official who recently retired as director of the EPA's multimedia office.

Perrotta has also accompanied Pruitt on flights and offered him advice on environmental policy and other agency matters, according to two of the sources.

Slotkin said Perrotta and others around Pruitt strained repeatedly against any restrictions on their activity, including longstanding federal limits on spending and conduct.

“They would object to anything when we said, ‘No, you can’t do that’ or ‘That would be wrong,’” Slotkin said. He added: “We’d say, ‘It’s not a matter of legality, it’s ethics, it’s the way things look.’ But they went out of their way to do something different.”

Now Perrotta’s own ethics are drawing scrutiny from members of Congress looking into Pruitt’s actions. Five Democratic lawmakers alleged in a letter sent to President Donald Trump on Thursday that EPA issued at least one contract to an employee of Perrotta’s private security firm, and that other contracts may have gone to Perrotta’s “friends or associates,” based on allegations from former agency deputy chief of staff Kevin Chmielewski.

Chmielewski, a former Trump campaign aide, has told lawmakers EPA fired him after he refused to retroactively approve first-class travel for one of Pruitt’s closest aides, former agency policy chief Samantha Dravis, according to the letter from Democrats including Sens. Tom Carper of Delaware and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. He also told the lawmakers that Perrotta threatened to go to his home to seize his EPA parking pass — adding that he “didn’t give a f---“ who might be listening to their phone call.

Perrotta did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Agency spokesman Jahan Wilcox defended EPA's decisions on Pruitt's security arrangements, calling them "similar to security protocol across the federal government.” He added that the agency had done similar security sweeps for former President Barack Obama's two EPA administrators, Lisa Jackson and Gina McCarthy.

“According to EPA’s Assistant Inspector General, Scott Pruitt has faced an unprecedented amount of death threats against him and security decisions are made by EPA’s Protective Service Detail," Wilcox said in a statement. "Americans should all agree that members of the President’s cabinet should be kept safe from these violent threats.”

Pruitt’s spending, relationships with industry lobbyists and reputation for excessive secrecy have generated calls for his firing from Democratic lawmakers, some Republicans and even White House staff. But he still has at least a public champion in Trump, who tweeted last weekend that “Scott is doing a great job!”

To the contrary, the current and former agency employees say Pruitt has fostered an atmosphere of chaos, mistrust and disregard for optics — and that Perrotta has been a crucial part of it.

Several said Perrotta’s personality and Pruitt’s expectations are both probably driving EPA’s security spending, adding that other key aides have signed off on the administrator’s expenses either willingly or begrudgingly.

“He’ll do anything to satisfy his boss,” said one departed career staffer.

Perrotta was born to Italian immigrants in New York and has spent his life in law enforcement, including in the Secret Service, where he said he protected presidents and dignitaries and investigated financial and organized crimes, according to “Dual Mission,” the autobiography he self-published in 2016.

In the book, he calls himself “completely misunderstood by most,” including family, friends and coworkers, in large part because of his “high level of energy.” Former and current colleagues have described Perrotta as rigidly loyal but also enthusiastic to push boundaries to get what he wants — an impression his book supports.

He recalls “creatively” finding ways to show probable cause to get warrants, providing financial incentives to police, and making sources of female "friends," "showering them with gifts that I was easily able to afford.”

Perrotta said he also let women hold his government-issued firearm in romantic situations. “It was, in some ways, like a dangerous, forbidden sex toy to some, and I played right along,” he recalled.

He said he liked the finer things, including a Rolex Submariner watch that he wore in his youth. When working for the Secret Service in Bulgaria, he wrote, he dressed “more like a gangster than law enforcement,” clad in square-toed, black biker boots and a black, Italian-made turtleneck sweater with a “.380 Sig” gun tucked underneath.

He joined EPA in 2004. That eventually brought him into Pruitt’s orbit.

Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general, had built a reputation in conservative Republican circles for his frequent lawsuits against the EPA’s Obama-era regulations, putting him at odds with much of the agency’s workforce. And his penchant for lavish spending was documented even before he arrived in Washington: An audit in Oklahoma showed that expenses at the attorney general's office surged during his tenure compared with his predecessor’s, The Intercept reported Thursday.

When Pruitt arrived at EPA after his confirmation in February 2017, his transition team had already made it clear that he expected around-the-clock security, a former agency employee who was there at the time said.

A week after Pruitt's first day at the agency, top staffers had a meeting on “24/7 security,” according to calendars obtained by the watchdog group American Oversight. Chief of staff Ryan Jackson met for half an hour with security officials including Henry Barnet, the director of the criminal enforcement office where Pruitt’s security detail is housed.

Perrotta was soon promoted to replace a career staffer who had pushed back on the administrator’s desire to use sirens to navigate D.C. traffic. He quickly developed a close relationship with Pruitt.

As head of Pruitt’s security detail, Perrotta has been instrumental in decisions for him to fly only first-class, upgrade to a souped-up SUV and have his office swept for bugs, a former Trump administration official said. Perrotta has also overseen Pruitt’s 19-person crew of bodyguards, which is three times the size of the team that protected McCarthy — and offers 24/7 protection that exceeds what most Cabinet members receive.

“Mr. Pruitt thinks he’s the president of the United States,” said the first former career staffer. “He’s big on image.”

The office sweep for listening devices — which was conducted by a company linked to Perrotta — rankled some career staffers and led to a scuffle between Perrotta and a member of the agency’s homeland security office at a meeting last summer, The New York Times reported Thursday.

Despite EPA's argument that Pruitt has received a record number of death threats, an internal report from the agency’s Office of Homeland Security suggests that the threats mainly consist of letters and criticism on social media that don’t warrant such blanket protection. (On Tuesday, the agency dismissed a staffer who had signed off on the memo and argued with Perrotta, for what it insists were issues dating back several years.)

But several current and former EPA staffers say they also consider the security fears overblown.

“We never saw any threat, never heard any threat,” said Slotkin, the former multimedia director. “If anything, it came from Pruitt, we would hear him speak about it. But there was no evidence that anybody could even get near him.”

That included many EPA employees: Slotkin said Perrotta cordoned off Pruitt’s suite of offices inside EPA’s headquarters at Federal Triangle, posting security guards to keep out anyone who wasn’t on an approved list. One restricted area was a chandelier-decorated conference room named after environmentalist Rachel Carson where agency employees had previously been allowed to hold events, Slotkin said.

“He didn’t want anybody near him,” Slotkin said.

Soon Perrotta was flying with Pruitt and discussing matters that went beyond security, two former employees said.

“It wasn’t uncommon that given travel and Nino’s proximity, he would always weigh in on matters beyond his scope as security, leveraging his institutional knowledge,” one said. “He often would say what he recalled prior administrators doing.”

By the spring of last year, Perrotta was regularly attending travel planning meetings with top political staff, including a March 30 international scheduling discussion and an April 10 talk on international travel, according to EPA records.

He and other security agents were closely involved in planning in May for a trip the following month to Italy, where Pruitt visited the Vatican and then attended G-7 environment meetings in Bologna. Perrotta had lived for two years in Rome on Secret Service assignment, where he made many connections, according to his book.

Wilcox said the security arrangements on the Italy trip were not novel. "EPA’s Protective Service Detail tried to replicate the same security measures taken when EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy traveled to Italy in 2015,” he wrote.

Thursday’s congressional letter offered a new detail about Perrotta: The Democratic senators said Chmielewski reported that Perrotta entered into a $30,000 contract with private Italian security personnel for that trip. Records have revealed that expense but did not disclose whether it was for a private detail.

One of the former EPA staffers said Perrotta was friends with those guards. That source described Pruitt’s protection while in Italy as extensive, with security agents from EPA and the U.S. Embassy, in addition to a large group of local agents.

News reports have revealed Pruitt also had a soundproof booth constructed for his office and considered having bulletproof desks installed.

And the spending isn’t over. EPA also appears to be planning to purchase bulletproof vests specially designed to blend in underneath regular clothing for his security detail, according to a solicitation issued on Friday. The solicitation calls for 16 white-colored vests of varying sizes manufactured by Velocity Systems, along with corresponding armor made of "special threat enhanced steel" and cummerbunds that provide enhanced protection.

The armor requested is just over a quarter-inch thick and can protect against the type of bullets shot from AK-47 rifles and some AR-15 semi-automatics, according to Velocity Systems' website.

EPA would not confirm to POLITICO whether the armor is for Pruitt’s protective detail or for other agents, saying only that all agents in EPA's criminal enforcement division, which includes Pruitt’s detail, "are assigned bulletproof vests" and that the effectiveness of the vests expires every five years. But a source familiar with EPA’s security operations said the vests are likely for Pruitt’s bodyguards because of their unusual specifications and the number requested. Other enforcement agents wouldn’t need their vests to be concealed, that source said.

 

[onekidanddone]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Pruitt's security chief goaded spending, employees say"

  Reveal hidden contents

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has had a willing partner in pushing for his massive spending on bodyguards and first-class flights, current and former EPA officials say — the Secret Service veteran who heads his security detail.

Pasquale “Nino” Perrotta played a key role in the investigation into mobster John "Junior" Gotti in the 1990s, and he’s boasted of his exploits with women, firearms and luxury watches in a self-published autobiography. Now he’s running security for the nation’s top environmental regulator like a lavishly funded SWAT team, according to interviews with seven people who have worked with him under both the Trump and Obama administrations.

The current and former staffers say that rather than acting as a restraint on Pruitt, who came into the agency a year ago demanding round-the-clock bodyguards, Perrotta has instead egged him on — indulging his requests for a 19-person security detail, high-performance SUV, $43,000 soundproof booth and bug-sweep of his offices, as well as first-class flights to limit his exposure to potential threats from fellow passengers. Perrotta has even barred all but a select group of agency employees from entering rooms and corridors near Pruitt’s offices, according to Ron Slotkin, a career official who recently retired as director of the EPA's multimedia office.

Perrotta has also accompanied Pruitt on flights and offered him advice on environmental policy and other agency matters, according to two of the sources.

Slotkin said Perrotta and others around Pruitt strained repeatedly against any restrictions on their activity, including longstanding federal limits on spending and conduct.

“They would object to anything when we said, ‘No, you can’t do that’ or ‘That would be wrong,’” Slotkin said. He added: “We’d say, ‘It’s not a matter of legality, it’s ethics, it’s the way things look.’ But they went out of their way to do something different.”

Now Perrotta’s own ethics are drawing scrutiny from members of Congress looking into Pruitt’s actions. Five Democratic lawmakers alleged in a letter sent to President Donald Trump on Thursday that EPA issued at least one contract to an employee of Perrotta’s private security firm, and that other contracts may have gone to Perrotta’s “friends or associates,” based on allegations from former agency deputy chief of staff Kevin Chmielewski.

Chmielewski, a former Trump campaign aide, has told lawmakers EPA fired him after he refused to retroactively approve first-class travel for one of Pruitt’s closest aides, former agency policy chief Samantha Dravis, according to the letter from Democrats including Sens. Tom Carper of Delaware and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. He also told the lawmakers that Perrotta threatened to go to his home to seize his EPA parking pass — adding that he “didn’t give a f---“ who might be listening to their phone call.

Perrotta did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Agency spokesman Jahan Wilcox defended EPA's decisions on Pruitt's security arrangements, calling them "similar to security protocol across the federal government.” He added that the agency had done similar security sweeps for former President Barack Obama's two EPA administrators, Lisa Jackson and Gina McCarthy.

“According to EPA’s Assistant Inspector General, Scott Pruitt has faced an unprecedented amount of death threats against him and security decisions are made by EPA’s Protective Service Detail," Wilcox said in a statement. "Americans should all agree that members of the President’s cabinet should be kept safe from these violent threats.”

Pruitt’s spending, relationships with industry lobbyists and reputation for excessive secrecy have generated calls for his firing from Democratic lawmakers, some Republicans and even White House staff. But he still has at least a public champion in Trump, who tweeted last weekend that “Scott is doing a great job!”

To the contrary, the current and former agency employees say Pruitt has fostered an atmosphere of chaos, mistrust and disregard for optics — and that Perrotta has been a crucial part of it.

Several said Perrotta’s personality and Pruitt’s expectations are both probably driving EPA’s security spending, adding that other key aides have signed off on the administrator’s expenses either willingly or begrudgingly.

“He’ll do anything to satisfy his boss,” said one departed career staffer.

Perrotta was born to Italian immigrants in New York and has spent his life in law enforcement, including in the Secret Service, where he said he protected presidents and dignitaries and investigated financial and organized crimes, according to “Dual Mission,” the autobiography he self-published in 2016.

In the book, he calls himself “completely misunderstood by most,” including family, friends and coworkers, in large part because of his “high level of energy.” Former and current colleagues have described Perrotta as rigidly loyal but also enthusiastic to push boundaries to get what he wants — an impression his book supports.

He recalls “creatively” finding ways to show probable cause to get warrants, providing financial incentives to police, and making sources of female "friends," "showering them with gifts that I was easily able to afford.”

Perrotta said he also let women hold his government-issued firearm in romantic situations. “It was, in some ways, like a dangerous, forbidden sex toy to some, and I played right along,” he recalled.

He said he liked the finer things, including a Rolex Submariner watch that he wore in his youth. When working for the Secret Service in Bulgaria, he wrote, he dressed “more like a gangster than law enforcement,” clad in square-toed, black biker boots and a black, Italian-made turtleneck sweater with a “.380 Sig” gun tucked underneath.

He joined EPA in 2004. That eventually brought him into Pruitt’s orbit.

Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general, had built a reputation in conservative Republican circles for his frequent lawsuits against the EPA’s Obama-era regulations, putting him at odds with much of the agency’s workforce. And his penchant for lavish spending was documented even before he arrived in Washington: An audit in Oklahoma showed that expenses at the attorney general's office surged during his tenure compared with his predecessor’s, The Intercept reported Thursday.

When Pruitt arrived at EPA after his confirmation in February 2017, his transition team had already made it clear that he expected around-the-clock security, a former agency employee who was there at the time said.

A week after Pruitt's first day at the agency, top staffers had a meeting on “24/7 security,” according to calendars obtained by the watchdog group American Oversight. Chief of staff Ryan Jackson met for half an hour with security officials including Henry Barnet, the director of the criminal enforcement office where Pruitt’s security detail is housed.

Perrotta was soon promoted to replace a career staffer who had pushed back on the administrator’s desire to use sirens to navigate D.C. traffic. He quickly developed a close relationship with Pruitt.

As head of Pruitt’s security detail, Perrotta has been instrumental in decisions for him to fly only first-class, upgrade to a souped-up SUV and have his office swept for bugs, a former Trump administration official said. Perrotta has also overseen Pruitt’s 19-person crew of bodyguards, which is three times the size of the team that protected McCarthy — and offers 24/7 protection that exceeds what most Cabinet members receive.

“Mr. Pruitt thinks he’s the president of the United States,” said the first former career staffer. “He’s big on image.”

The office sweep for listening devices — which was conducted by a company linked to Perrotta — rankled some career staffers and led to a scuffle between Perrotta and a member of the agency’s homeland security office at a meeting last summer, The New York Times reported Thursday.

Despite EPA's argument that Pruitt has received a record number of death threats, an internal report from the agency’s Office of Homeland Security suggests that the threats mainly consist of letters and criticism on social media that don’t warrant such blanket protection. (On Tuesday, the agency dismissed a staffer who had signed off on the memo and argued with Perrotta, for what it insists were issues dating back several years.)

But several current and former EPA staffers say they also consider the security fears overblown.

“We never saw any threat, never heard any threat,” said Slotkin, the former multimedia director. “If anything, it came from Pruitt, we would hear him speak about it. But there was no evidence that anybody could even get near him.”

That included many EPA employees: Slotkin said Perrotta cordoned off Pruitt’s suite of offices inside EPA’s headquarters at Federal Triangle, posting security guards to keep out anyone who wasn’t on an approved list. One restricted area was a chandelier-decorated conference room named after environmentalist Rachel Carson where agency employees had previously been allowed to hold events, Slotkin said.

“He didn’t want anybody near him,” Slotkin said.

Soon Perrotta was flying with Pruitt and discussing matters that went beyond security, two former employees said.

“It wasn’t uncommon that given travel and Nino’s proximity, he would always weigh in on matters beyond his scope as security, leveraging his institutional knowledge,” one said. “He often would say what he recalled prior administrators doing.”

By the spring of last year, Perrotta was regularly attending travel planning meetings with top political staff, including a March 30 international scheduling discussion and an April 10 talk on international travel, according to EPA records.

He and other security agents were closely involved in planning in May for a trip the following month to Italy, where Pruitt visited the Vatican and then attended G-7 environment meetings in Bologna. Perrotta had lived for two years in Rome on Secret Service assignment, where he made many connections, according to his book.

Wilcox said the security arrangements on the Italy trip were not novel. "EPA’s Protective Service Detail tried to replicate the same security measures taken when EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy traveled to Italy in 2015,” he wrote.

Thursday’s congressional letter offered a new detail about Perrotta: The Democratic senators said Chmielewski reported that Perrotta entered into a $30,000 contract with private Italian security personnel for that trip. Records have revealed that expense but did not disclose whether it was for a private detail.

One of the former EPA staffers said Perrotta was friends with those guards. That source described Pruitt’s protection while in Italy as extensive, with security agents from EPA and the U.S. Embassy, in addition to a large group of local agents.

News reports have revealed Pruitt also had a soundproof booth constructed for his office and considered having bulletproof desks installed.

And the spending isn’t over. EPA also appears to be planning to purchase bulletproof vests specially designed to blend in underneath regular clothing for his security detail, according to a solicitation issued on Friday. The solicitation calls for 16 white-colored vests of varying sizes manufactured by Velocity Systems, along with corresponding armor made of "special threat enhanced steel" and cummerbunds that provide enhanced protection.

The armor requested is just over a quarter-inch thick and can protect against the type of bullets shot from AK-47 rifles and some AR-15 semi-automatics, according to Velocity Systems' website.

EPA would not confirm to POLITICO whether the armor is for Pruitt’s protective detail or for other agents, saying only that all agents in EPA's criminal enforcement division, which includes Pruitt’s detail, "are assigned bulletproof vests" and that the effectiveness of the vests expires every five years. But a source familiar with EPA’s security operations said the vests are likely for Pruitt’s bodyguards because of their unusual specifications and the number requested. Other enforcement agents wouldn’t need their vests to be concealed, that source said.

 

I can't even imagine what it must be like to be a career EPA employee who as to work near him and see him every day. Pure hell I bet.

[AmazonGrace]

It's Monday so somebody is breaking the law lol nothing matters 

 

[onekidanddone]

Go away Scott. Just go away.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Scott Pruitt’s travel could leave him with a big tax bill"

Spoiler

Scott Pruitt could be in tax trouble on top of his ethical and political problems.

The embattled administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency has reportedly spent nearly $3 million on security and travel since taking office in February 2017. That sum apparently includes the cost of a security detail that accompanied Pruitt and his family on a vacation to Disneyland and the Rose Bowl this winter.

Pruitt might owe federal and D.C. taxes on a large chunk of that money.

Government officials, like private-sector employees, must pay tax on “all income from whatever source derived.” That includes “fringe benefits” from an employer unless the fringe benefit falls within the scope of a specific exclusion.

Section 132 of the Internal Revenue Code provides an exclusion for “working condition fringes.” The Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service have promulgated detailed regulations that address when an employer-provided security detail can be counted as a “working condition fringe.”

The general rule is that when an employer provides bodyguards who transport and accompany an employee on personal travel, the value of the bodyguards’ services can be excluded as a “working condition fringe” only if a “bona fide business-oriented security concern” exists. To meet that requirement, the employer must conduct an independent security study and implement an “overall security program.” The overall security program must protect the employee on a 24-hour basis. If the employer provides the employee with transportation in a chauffeured vehicle, the chauffeur must be trained in “evasive driving techniques.”

These rules apply similarly to government and private-sector employers and employees. A 1992 amendment to the regulations expressly addresses the independent study requirement for government agencies: An agency satisfies the requirement if a person designated by the agency conducts a study in accordance with written internal procedures, and if the agency then applies the study’s specific recommendations on a consistent basis.

It’s doubtful that Pruitt’s security detail satisfies the criteria for exclusion as a working condition fringe. In a February 2018 threat assessment, an intelligence team in the EPA’s Office of Homeland Security said that it “has not identified any specific credible direct threat” to Pruitt. The intelligence team said it saw no indication that Pruitt “would be at any greater risk on a commercial airline than any other passenger.” That suggests that Pruitt has not obtained the independent study required under IRS rules. Thus, the value of services provided by the security detail to Pruitt’s family on non-business trips would appear to be income on which the EPA administrator owes tax.

This doesn’t mean that Pruitt must pay tax on all of his travel-related expenses. Business travel — even chauffeured business travel — will generally count as a working condition fringe regardless of whether the security study requirements are met. But Pruitt presumably was not going to the Disney theme park on business (even though some of his statements on climate change might suggest that he is running the EPA from Fantasyland). And he and his family did not attend the Rose Bowl for environmental protection purposes — they were there to root for the Oklahoma Sooners, the top college football team in Pruitt’s home state. Trips that mix business with pleasure pose more difficult line-drawing questions, but at least some of Pruitt’s travel with his security detail appears to fall far on the personal side of the business/personal divide.

To be sure, Pruitt might not be a top target for the IRS under the Trump administration. But the agency has, to its credit, fought hard to maintain its independence from party politics, and Pruitt stands some risk of a random audit just like everyone else who has been rushing to meet Tuesday’s tax filing deadline. The Internal Revenue Code explicitly prohibits the president and other top administration officials from intervening in audits of taxpayers. Also, the general statute of limitations for an omission from gross income is three years from the date that a return is filed, so Pruitt could face federal tax consequences even after the end of Trump’s first term.

Moreover, we now know that Pruitt has been renting a condo on Capitol Hill from the wife of an energy lobbyist. If Pruitt lived there for 183 days in a single year, he will have to pay D.C. income taxes, too. If he fails to report his fringe-benefit income on his D.C. tax return, then the District’s Office of Tax and Revenue could come after him.

Publicly traded corporations are generally more forthcoming than federal agencies about the security costs they pay with respect to their leaders. Amazon, for example, acknowledged in its 2017 proxy statement that it paid $1.6 million the prior year for chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos’s personal security. (Bezos also owns The Washington Post.) We don’t know how much of that, if any, Bezos reports as income to the IRS. It’s a safe bet, though, that Amazon’s and Bezos’s tax advisers have carefully reviewed the rules to determine whether their independent study and overall security program satisfy the agency’s requirements.

Our unsolicited advice to Pruitt is that he should take a hard look, too. If, indeed, he has been charging purely personal expenses to taxpayers, it’s time that he gave some of that money back.

Maybe having the prestige of a 24/7 security detail won't be worth it to Scotty if he has to pay taxes on said detail.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Zinke failed to disclose campaign ties to speech host, IG says"

Spoiler

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke failed to disclose relevant information to ethics officials when he traveled to Las Vegas to speak to the Golden Knights hockey team last year, the department’s watchdog reported Monday — including the fact that one of his biggest campaign donors owned the team.

The report by Interior's inspector general also raised questions about whether taxpayers should have been on the hook for a $12,000 charter flight that Zinke took after the speech from Las Vegas to his home state of Montana. Because Zinke's speech did not even mention the Interior Department, the IG said it's unlikely ethics officials would have OK'd it as official business.

"If ethics officials had known Zinke’s speech would have no nexus to the DOI, they likely would not have approved this as an official event, thus eliminating the need for a chartered flight," the report said. "Moreover, had ethics officials been made aware that the Golden Knights’ owner had been a donor to Zinke’s congressional campaign, it might have prompted further review and discussion."

The report found that Interior did not break any laws, but that Zinke’s failure to disclose his relationship with Golden Knights owner Bill Foley and the content of his speech prevented a closer look by ethics officials.

Ed McDonnell, an ethics attorney at Interior’s Office of the Solicitor, told investigators that “he was surprised” that Zinke’s speech to the NHL team focused on the former Montana congressman’s time as a Navy SEAL and did not mention the agency or Zinke's activities as secretary, according to the report.

“When asked whether the trip would have been approved if the Ethics Office had known the substance of the speech and the cost of the chartered flight ahead of time, McDonnell told investigators, ‘I don’t know if it would have been approved as an official event,’” the report said.

An Interior spokesperson did not immediately offer comment on the report.

The Las Vegas trip is just one of several occasions when Zinke mixed political events and fundraisers into his official travel itinerary. Interior asked the Virgin Islands GOP for and received reimbursement for expenses after Zinke appeared at the group’s fundraiser in March 2017 during an official visit to the islands, an appearance that put him in danger of violating Hatch Act requirements against executive branch officials using their positions for partisan purposes.

The IG said Zinke first mentioned wanting to speak to Foley’s hockey club during his first week as Interior secretary but did not tell departmental ethics staff that Foley had been one of his campaign contributors. Foley, who is also chairman of Fidelity National Financial, personally donated $7,800 to Zinke’s 2014 congressional campaign, and Fidelity employees and PACs associated with the company gave another $166,860.

Melinda Loftin, Interior’s top ethics official last year, told investigators that if her staff had known that fact, it may not have altered the approval of the trip but could have prompted a discussion about “the optics.”

According to the report, Zinke said that ethics officials had not told him his speech needed to reference Interior, and that he did not believe disclosing his relationship to Foley “would have made a difference in their decision.”

Zinke was the “final arbiter” of approving the speech and the trip, not ethics officers, McDonnell told investigators.

Interior officials also said the decision to travel to Las Vegas to speak to the hockey team was made prior to the decision for Zinke to make a federal grant announcement in the town of Pahrump, Nev., about 60 miles from Las Vegas.

Typically, those grant announcements were made by press release rather than on site, Olivia Ferriter, deputy assistant secretary at Interior’s Office of Policy, Management and Budget, told the inspector general.

“We determined that the location of the [grant] announcement was selected after Zinke and his staff already planned to be in Las Vegas for the Golden Knights event, and that Zinke had been aware of the Golden Knights event as early as March 7, 2017, 6 days after he became Secretary,” the inspector general report said.

Zinke had initially told investigators that his speech to the Golden Knights was not the first event on that trip’s itinerary to be planned, “but he then acknowledged that it could have been,” the report states.

“But it didn’t drive the schedule,” the report quotes Zinke as telling investigators. “The priority was not the hockey team.”

The report goes on to say that Zinke could have avoided taking the charter flight to Montana to speak at a Western Governors’ Association meeting the next morning if he had scheduled the Golden Knights speech for another time when cheaper flights were available. Employees at Interior and the Golden Knights said the timing for the event was flexible, and could easily have been set at a later date.

One Interior employee told investigators that Zinke’s chief of staff, Scott Hommel, described the meeting as a “firm event.” Hommel told investigators he did not recall discussing adjusting the schedule.

And Hommel “acknowledged that the cost of the flight seemed high, but added that a cabinet secretary ‘needs to get where he needs to get,’” investigators said in the report.

The IG found that Zinke’s use of other charter flights for travel in the Virgin Islands and Alaska was justified because of a lack of alternatives.

Interior also paid the White House $52,000 for a flight on Air Force One and another on Air Force Two that Zinke never actually took, the report said. In both cases, the White House asked Zinke to take the flights, then removed the invitation but never reimbursed Interior for the money spent. Interior spent another $105,000 on four flights Zinke took on the two planes and owes $28,000 for a fifth.

 

[AmazonGrace]

Another white supremacist Trump hire: 

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

Because of course he did.