A state court ordered Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to turn over more than 2,500 emails his office withheld from open records requests relating to communications with coal, oil, and gas corporations. The order came a day before the Senate is poised to confirm him as President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The Senate is set to vote on Pruitt’s confirmation at 12:30 p.m. on Friday, February 27. It is unclear if the order by Oklahoma District Court Judge Aletia Haynes Timmons late on Thursday afternoon will delay the vote.
Judge Timmons gave Pruitt’s office until Tuesday, February 21 to turn over the emails it withheld from the Center for Media and Democracy’s (CMD’s) January 2015 records request. The judge also gave Pruitt’s office just 10 days to turn over an undetermined number of documents that relate to five additional open records requests filed between November 2015 and August 2016.
According to the CMD, on February 10, Pruitt’s office “finally responded” to the oldest of the watchdog organization’s nine outstanding Open Records Act requests, but it provided just 411 of the more than 3,000 emails they had located. The CMD said the office was “withholding thousands of emails relevant to the request and still failing to respond to CMD’s eight other outstanding requests.”
Republicans on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW) have been eager to confirm Pruitt. After Democratic senators twice boycotted the EPW Committee vote due to concerns over Pruitt’s conflicts of interests and failure to fulfill open records requests, Republicans suspended committee rules and advanced a vote on his confirmation on the Senate floor.
Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), EPW chairman, on February 16 said in remarks on the Senate floor that attorneys general from 24 states have endorsed Pruitt “as someone who can protect the environment, while also protecting state decision-making.”
The EPW had “thoroughly vetted Mr. Pruitt,” he said. “We held a confirmation hearing that lasted more than six hours. That is by far the longest confirmation hearing for an EPA administrator on record.” Barrasso blamed Democrats for “delay tactics” to slow down Pruitt’s confirmation.
Earlier this week, the EPW’s Democratic senators noted that questions put to Pruitt during his confirmation hearing about connections to the fossil fuel industry had been diverted. “Rather than divulge it, Pruitt referred the Senators to his own office’s process for requesting documents under Oklahoma’s Open Records Act—a process that can take months, or even years, to complete,” the office of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said in a statement.
During his confirmation hearing, Pruitt directed senators to make Open Records Act requests 19 times. At the same time, Pruitt responded to Sen. Whitehouse’s concerns about an open records backlog by saying that he was not involved in the open records requests process.
The EPW’s Democrats on February 15 called on Judge Timmons to expedite review of the CMD’s case (Center for Media and Democracy v. Scott Pruitt, CV-2017-223) because it could help uncover information needed to understand whether Pruitt engaged with industries that he would be responsible for regulating as EPA administrator.
Meanwhile, since February 6, nearly 330 additional former EPA officials have signed a letter publicly opposing Pruitt’s confirmation, bringing the total to 773.
“Our perspective is not partisan,” the letter states.
“The American people have been served by EPA Administrators, Republicans and Democrats, who have embraced their responsibility to protect public health and the environment. Different administrators have come to different conclusions about how best to apply the law in view of the science, and many of their decisions have been challenged in court, sometimes successfully, for either going too far or not far enough,” it says.
“But in the large majority of cases it was evident to us that they put the public’s welfare ahead of private interests. Scott Pruitt has not demonstrated this same commitment.”
—Sonal Patel, associate editor (@POWERmagazine, @sonalcpatel)
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