Iowa Lawmakers Share Their Thoughts on Scott Pruitt’s Resignation

When asked Thursday by reporters whether there was a “final straw” that led to Pruitt’s removal, Trump denied it.

The OSC, an independent investigative and prosecutorial agency, rarely comment on the status of investigations, and it didn’t respond to requests for comment regarding the status of its Pruitt probe.

Pruitt had become a constant source of embarrassment to a president who had entered Washington promising to “Drain the Swamp”. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who’s a major climate change skeptic and who told CNN past year the EPA is “brainwashing our kids”.

Wheeler is not someone who has sought the spotlight.

In a recent interview, Wheeler told the Washington Examiner that he wasn’t interested in the top job at the agency. Many questioned the ethics of him renting an apartment in Washington, D.C., from the wife of an energy lobbyist and traveling frequently to his home state of Oklahoma on the taxpayers’ dime.

But this less flashy style is unlikely to endear him to environmental groups that had been critical of Pruitt.

“I have accepted the resignation of Scott Pruitt as the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency”, tweeted the president, ending months of speculation about the future of the man he tasked with dismantling Barack Obama’s green legacy. Don’t count on Wheeler demonstrating a sudden commitment to protecting the environment.

During his confirmation hearing to be the EPA’s deputy administrator, Wheeler was overshadowed by another Trump nominee, Kathleen Hartnett White – Wheeler’s nomination was therefore under less scrutiny. Murray’s CEO Robert Murray has supported Trump for years, and long worked to do away with health and safety regulations like the Clean Power Plan.

Scott Pruitt survived months of misconduct allegations by preserving his relationship with one person at all costs: President Donald Trump. His designated successor, Andrew Wheeler, is at least as firmly tied to the carbon-based energy industry as Pruitt. Before that, he worked for the grandfather of climate denial, Sen. Wheeler was majority staff director, minority staff director and chief counsel to the committee, according to a now-deleted press release from Faegre Baker Daniels, an energy lobbying firm.

“There’s never been more of a threat to liberty, you know, to what we know as the protections that are inherent in our Constitution than what we live today”, Pruitt told CBN’s Chief Political Correspondent David Brody.

After heaping praise on Pruitt, President Trump announced that Wheeler-already deputy administrator at the EPA since April-would be his successor.

The former EPA head reluctantly resigned on Thursday after White House chief of staff John Kelly informed him it was time to leave, two people familiar with the situation told Bloomberg.

When he was still working as a lobbyist in 2016, Wheeler wrote a six-point takedown of Trump on Facebook. He also says he believes that his “inalienable” right to own a gun comes directly from God. “That’s a disturbing pattern that I think is very common to natural resources management in general in the Trump administration”.