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Former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt was confirmed to be administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last week in a 52-46 Senate vote. His narrow confirmation is secure—Pruitt addressed EPA employees as their new boss just yesterday—but a trove of e-mails sent from Pruitt’s office during his tenure as Oklahoma attorney general was released yesterday evening. Collectively, they could shed light on how closely Pruitt may be willing to work with the industries he’s now in charge of regulating.
On Tuesday evening, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) received 2,500 e-mails from the Oklahoma AG’s office that had been sent during Pruitt’s tenure. The CMD had asked for the e-mails in an open records request made in 2015, but the AG’s office only turned over 411 of 3,000 e-mails initially. This month, with Pruitt’s confirmation vote just days away, the CMD requested that a judge order the missing documents finally be turned over. The judge gave the Oklahoma AG’s office until February 21 to share the remaining e-mails, which comprised more than 7,500 pages. Senate democrats tried to stall the vote on Pruitt’s nomination until the remaining e-mails were released, but they were unsuccessful.
The New York Times, which had been able to see some of the e-mails ahead of time due to records requests from the paper’s own reporting, notes that the e-mails “do not appear to include any request for [Pruitt’s] intervention explicitly in exchange for campaign contributions, although Mr. Pruitt was separately working as a member of the Republican Attorneys General Association to raise money from many of the same companies.”
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