National review says Scott Pruitt should quit at EPA

[Snowboarder_Bo]

Somebody make sure the National Review is publishing the names of other Trump administration officials who should resign, eh.

[Jophiel]

@KidCharlemagne

Do you all think Pruitt actually offered his resignation or was he essentially fired by Trump?

I’m guessing her got cut loose. Every day was a new story about him or another former employee going on record about how Pruitt did this or that. Today it was about Pruitt doctoring his scheduling record (and firing someone for questioning it) which is, you know, kind of illegal.

[dalej42]

While this would ordinarily be a Friday news dump, today is basically a Friday as many people took Thursday and Friday off after the 4th. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s more resignations, such as Kelley, tomorrow

[RickJay]

@Steve_MB

The first answer that came to mind was Albert B. Fall (Harding’s Secretary of the Interior, notorious for the Teapot Dome scandal), but on second thought a full investigation of all the dirty dealings that went on beneath Pruitt’s personal Cone of Silence would probably put Fall out of the running.

In terms of calculating Corruption Quotient, I have to ask whether you’re putting more weight on the number of scandals or the magnitude of them.

Pruitt is surely the all time record holder for the NUMBER of scandals. In less than two years he managed to become the target of over a dozen formal inquiries into his corruption.

On the other hand, Pruitt’s scandals are bizarrely petty. He’s not any sort of criminal mastermind; he’s a small time grifter who doesn’t care about basic ethics. His scandals are pitty-patty shit. So is Pruitt more or less corrupt than someone who pulls only one scam, but it’s a BIG scam?

[RickG]

@RickJay

[…]Pruitt’s scandals are bizarrely petty. He’s not any sort of criminal mastermind; he’s a small time grifter who doesn’t care about basic ethics. His scandals are pitty-patty shit. So is Pruitt more or less corrupt than someone who pulls only one scam, but it’s a BIG scam?

Jacob Weisberg on Slate makes a distinction between grifters and grafters:

Maria Konnikova did an excellent podcast series about grifters, many of whom she met working on her book The Confidence Game. For the grifter, ripping people off is seldom the point. The grifter is an artiste, who invests in the long con. He (or she) takes pleasure in gulling the trusting and eluding justice. The grifter has multiple partners, multiple stories, multiple identities. The grifter is theatrical, if not actually delusional. The grifter wants your applause, not just your pocket watch. The Duke and the Dauphin in Huckleberry Finn were grifters, charlatans par excellence. Charles Ponzi was a grifter. William Avery Rockefeller, the father of John D. Rockefeller, was a grifter.

The grafter, by contrast, is a run-of-the-mill abuser of the public trust. He needs no audience and prefers not having one. Where the grifter is shameless, the grafter shrinks from exposure, which could only endanger the racket. He is greedy, but not creatively ambitious. He toils in mundane self-dealing, insider trading, bribe taking, witness tampering, and other forms of workaday corruption. Spiro Agnew was a grafter. William Jefferson, the Louisiana congressman who kept cash in the freezer in his apartment, was a grafter. Illinois governors are inevitably grafters, as is any politician whose name is preceded by “Boss” (see: Louisiana).

In Weisberg’s formulation, Pruitt is definitely a grafter. Trump, of course, is a grifter.

(Worth reading the rest of the short piece to see his breakdown of much of the rest of Trump’s inner circle.)

[asahi]

@Jophiel

According to Pruitt (via Fox News):
Who could have guessed that unprecedented corruption leads to unprecedented attacks?

2nd in Command Andrew Wheeler is in charge of the EPA for now. He is a former coal lobbyist so don’t expect any changes.

No policy changes, just maybe better at concealing his corruption. I suspect Pruitt was kept past his expiration date because Trump admired the job he was doing in wrecking the EPA as a federal agency with any real power. Wheeler will probably continue to do that job but with a lower profile.