Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Scott Pruitt has justified spending money to hire dozens of personal security guards, install bio-metric locks and a sound-proof booth in his office by claiming he has received a large number of death threats, but who says that's actually true?
Journalists who've submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the EPA for records of threats received by the agency have been told that there are no applicable records to give them, meaning the agency either hasn't received any threats or didn't write it down.
I suspect they haven't actually received any. The New York Times reports that Pruitt's staff have scoured social media for negative posts about Pruitt and interpreted that as a threat.
The social media efforts have come under scrutiny by some Democratic lawmakers, as well as senior officials at the E.P.A., who said the review had uncovered individuals sounding off against Mr. Pruitt but had found no actionable threats against him. One top E.P.A. official said in an interview that he had objected to the efforts when they were first discussed last year, to no avail.
Suspicious posts are referred to the E.P.A. inspector general’s office, which is charged with investigating threats. Spokesmen for both the inspector general and the E.P.A. declined to comment on the nature of specific threats, citing security concerns. The E.P.A. spokesman, Jahan Wilcox, said in a statement, “Scott Pruitt has faced an unprecedented amount of death threats against him.”
As someone who has had plenty to say about human slimeball Scott Pruitt, it's possible my own tweets have been recorded as some kind of threat to support Pruitt's paranoid delusions of grandeur. That doesn't concern me nearly as much as it delights me and I encourage anyone with a social media account to say that Pruitt is a corrupt, pathetic slob. You know, for the official record in the Library of Congress.
The conservative Daily Caller reported this morning that the White House is considering replacing Scott Pruitt with another industry lobbyist who may be slightly less comically corrupt.