said, he s turned a blind eye to ethics, as long as scott pruett is doing serious damage to clean air, clean water, turning a blind eye to climate change, he s doing what donald trump wants him to do. we can never normalize this disregard of ethics and we have to keep talking about it, i do think at some point there is something that s going to be the final straw, what it is, i m not sure. chris lieu, someone who has been there, but never quite had to confront something like this. thank you. nice to see you, we ll be right back, stay with us 37.
apparently come forward over a period of 4 to 6 weeks by phone, by e-mail and in person meetings. they ve come forward to alert the senate committee that there is another scandal of this type at the epa, another senior no show staffer, in this case, it s a senior council to scott pru t pruett, someone he hired. an official to be the closest aid to scott pruett at the agency, she has resigned in the past week, according to these staffers that have come forward she was allegedly being paid full time, even though she wasn t turning up at work for months at a time. for three months between november and january. joining us now is chris lieu. he s now a senior fellow at the university of virginia miller center. thank you for being here. it s a weird story. it is, but it s part and parcel of a culture of anything goes.
we ve seen with pruitt, a culture of misconduct. when you have that culture, it s not surprising at all. when you were managing the cabinet in the obama administration, if you got word of an alleged scandal, not necessarily the administrator but a senior staff, something weird about some hiring, money that was paid to augment someone s salary, it looks like that s not where the money should have come from. there s a no show job in this case. is that the sort of thing you would expect the administrator to fix the cabinet official to fix? or is that something where the white house might get involved? that s the important point, we in the obama administration all salary increases had to be cleared by the white house. whether it was scrutinizing trips, all of these things came to the w40us.
at the end he was getting paid more than the head of the epa. what did he say he did with all the time once he got caught? he was working around the house, riding his bicycle and reading books. basically he s my hero. he was eventually caught, he pled guilty in 2013 of de23r5uding the u.s. government of a lot of money. it boggles the mind that a real person, not a character in a movie could pull something of that magnitude as long as he did. those adventures are back in the news. among epa administrator scott pruett s pile of scandals, is that epa staffers have
we had the tone of ethics, because president obama set that tone. you have donald trump who s been belate an thely hostile to ethics. they haven t set up the processes to check these kinds of abuses. on the staffing issue, the large raises we are discussing. the way that s been reported out. scott pruett denies any of it. it looks like the white house may have not cleared some of the people who he wanted to hire. and, therefore, the administrator seems to have decided with his senior staff he would use the safe drinking water act as a way to circumvent that white house turning them down to get those people hired anyway. is that the sort of circumstance defying going behind the white house s back. that would seem to be a fatal