During their interviews with congressional investigators last Thursday and Friday, two of Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt's top aides discussed how Pruitt asked them to do things like help his wife find a job and look into ways he could get out of a rental agreement without having to pay any penalties, three people familiar with the sessions told The Washington Post.
Samantha Dravis, the EPA's former associate administrator for the Office of Policy, and Pruitt's chief of staff, Ryan Jackson, were interviewed separately by staffers of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Dravis revealed that Pruitt asked her to contact the Republican Attorneys General Association, which he once led and where she once worked, while trying to find his wife a job that paid at least $200,000, but she refused to avoid any potential conflicts of interest, the Post reports. Dravis is a lawyer, and also said she was asked along with another top aide, Sarah Greenwalt, to review a rental agreement he wanted to break, people with knowledge of the interview told the Post, to see if they could find a way he could get out of the agreement without having to pay any penalties.
As for Jackson, he confirmed that he did assist with connecting Pruitt to lobbyist J. Steven Hart; Pruitt paid just $50 a night to stay at a condo owned by Hart's wife Vicki, in an agreement that Jackson said was only supposed to last six weeks (it ended up lasting six months). Read more about their interviews at The Washington Post.
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