Scott Pruitt
Is an Ethics Nightmare, But So Is Ryan Zinke
President Donald Trump, with US Secretary
of the Interior Ryan Zinke (L) and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, speaks in
Cincinnati, Ohio, on June 7, 2017.NICHOLAS KAMM / AFP / GETTY IMAGES
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PUBLISHED
June 23, 2018
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A Westerner appointed to President Trump’s
cabinet, he’s drawn attention for his penchant for expensive travel,
vanity perquisites of office, abuse of agency staff time, and cozy personal
financial deals with business executives whose industries he oversees.
Meanwhile, he has denied the dangers of climate change, met extensively with
corporate lobbyists, and gutted the environmental protections implemented by
prior administrations.
Yes, that’s entitled EPA administrator Scott
Pruitt, whose record of seeking personal luxuries and advantages at taxpayer expense,
while gearing policy to polluting industries, and punishing subordinates who object,
is breathtakingly awful.
But it also pretty well describes Secretary of
the Interior Ryan Zinke.
The latest Zinke outrage is a stunning investigative report in Politico about a
development deal in which Zinke stands to benefit financially by leveraging
land that was donated to a charitable foundation he established and is now run
by his wife, Lola. The proposed tourist development, in Zinke’s hometown of
Whitefish, Montana, is funded by David Lesar, chairman (and, until last year,
CEO) of the huge oil services company Halliburton. Lesar is a Zinke friend
and contributor to his 2014 House campaign.
Halliburton is in line to gain extensive
revenues from Zinke’s actions at Interior to expand drilling on public lands
and offshore. The company’s top lobbyist has regularly met with Zinke’s
Interior Department to discuss issues like hydraulic fracturing, and last year
Zinke blocked Obama administration rules that curbed fracking on federal lands.
Zinke, in a speech last September to an oil industry group, praised fracking,
which has poisoned the water in communities across the U.S. and poses risks of
gas leaks and increased global warming. “Fracking,” he said, “is proof that God’s got a good sense
of humor and he loves us.”
According to the Politico report, Lola Zinke has
signed a letter of intent to allow the Whitefish project developer to construct
a parking lot on land that was donated to the Zinkes’ foundation for a
“Veterans Peace Park.” Meanwhile, Whitefish’s city manager said the
project developers “certainly implied that they were working with [Zinke]
to find a place” in the development for a microbrewery that the Zinkes would
operate. The Zinkes also own land adjacent to the development that could
increase in value if the project goes forward.
Marilyn Glynn, acting director of the Office of
Government Ethics under George W. Bush, told Politico that the development deal
crossed ethical lines and at a minimum required Zinke to recuse from matters
involving Halliburton. “In a previous administration, whether Bush or
Obama, you’d never run across something like this,” she said. “Nobody would be
engaging in business deals” with people whose companies were regulated by their
own department. Zinke did respond to Politico’s questions about the
relationship with Lesar.
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If the apparent corruption in this real estate
deal isn’t bad enough — the Zinkes stand to make money off a deal backed by an
executive of a major corporation that is seeking, and reaping, benefits from
Zinke’s department — it’s echoed in the troubling manner in which their
foundation acquired the land in the first place. Freight railroad giant BNSF
Railway had donated the land to the Zinke foundation for the veterans park;
soon after that, Zinke won his election for state senate and then voted for a
bill that would have aided BNSF by directing millions in state funding to
railroad construction.
UPDATE 06-22-18: Politico reports that Zinke met at Interior last
August with Lesar and Casey Malmquist, lead developer of the Whitefish real
estate project, took them on a tour of the Lincoln Memorial, and then went to
dinner where, Malmquist acknowledges, they discussed the land deal.
But the whole tawdry episode is merely a small
piece of the tapestry of sleazy behavior that has characterized Zinke both
before and after he took the oath to be interior secretary.
There has been so much more.
Zinke has been active in funneling money
to scam political committees that rip off
elderly donors by taking their money and then mostly keeping it for executive
and consultant salaries. One of those committees set up by Zinke, Special
Operations for America, appealed to donors for funding to attack President
Obama in 2012 for taking credit for killing Osama bin Laden. But Federal
Election Commission reports revealed that only $7,000 of the $180,000 raised by
the PAC that year was spent on influencing the election. Meanwhile, the
PAC doled out almost $40,000 for consulting and travel expenses to a
corporation set up by Ryan and Lola Zinke.
In March 2017, after joining Trump’s cabinet,
Zinke attended a fundraiser on St. Croix for Virgin Islands GOP PAC, a
group that has raised $5.7 million since it launched in February 2015 but has
spent only $76,000 on congressional candidates, including $3,500 to Zinke’s campaign
and Zinke’s own SEAL PAC.
The Federal Election Commission is now probing SEAL PAC for a range of troubling irregularities, including large
spending on direct mail and discrepancies in reporting.
Scott Homell and Vincent
DeVito, who worked for, respectively, Special Operations for America
and SEAL PAC, are now two of Zinke’s top aides at Interior.
As Secretary, Zinke has repeatedly used
private charter planes, including a $12,375 charter
flight from Las Vegas to Whitefish on a plane owned by fossil fuel company
executives, and charters between Caribbean islands ― all on routes where
commercial flights were available. The Department’s inspector general probed Zinke’s June 2017 Las Vegas trip,
during which he delivered a pep talk to the Vegas Golden Knights hockey team,
owned by Whitefish resident and major Zinke donor Bill Foley, and then charged
taxpayers for the charter to Montana; they found that the Knights had offered
to reschedule the talk so he could book a commercial flight, but Zinke said,
it’s cool, I’ll take the charter. Zinke didn’t disclose his relationship with
Foley to ethics officials reviewing the trip; he also claimed that the speech
to the Knights, which never mentioned Interior issues, made sense because he
was doing a nearby meeting with county commissioners, but it turned out Zinke’s
team booked that event only after the session with the Knights was set up.
Zinke also spent $14,000 in taxpayer money
on helicopter rides in the DC area last
summer so he could attend (1) the swearing-in of his head-butting congressional successor Greg Gianforte and
(2) a horseback riding date with Vice President Pence.
And Zinke and Lola brought an Interior security detail along
on their vacation last summer to Greece and Turkey.
Lola Zinke has reportedly been driving Interior
staff nuts with her own extensive travel
demands, such as last-minute requests to attend and add guests to conservative
events.
Zinke and Lola also are using a lot of Interior
staff time and money to book, for friends and supporters, VIP tours of those American monuments
that they haven’t yet, at the behest of corporations, turned into uranium mines and oil drilling sites.
His staff said Zinke knew nothing about paying $139,000 for a door for his office
(just as Pruitt says he didn’t know about the $43,000 cost of his
soundproof booth).
Zinke has required his security staff to hoist a
special secretarial flag on the Interior Department’s roof whenever he’s in the
building, and to remove it when Zinke departs. In addition, as the Washington
Post reported, “He has commissioned commemorative
coins with his name on them to give to staff and visitors, but the cost to
taxpayers is unclear.”
Zinke also has regularly used a personal email address to conduct
Interior business, even though … you know: Obviously as a House
member he attacked Hillary Clinton for doing just that.
Zinke reassigned many of Interior’s senior
employees ― for example moving Interior’s chief climate policy expert to the
royalty collection division — in moves that appeared punitive. (A Department
inspector general investigation somehow concluded that because Department officials
did not document their reasons for reassigning the employees or “gather the
information needed to make informed decisions about the reassignments,” the IG
could not determine whether or not officials complied with the law.) Zinke also
named only political appointees, including several ex-industry lobbyists, to a
Department committee on personnel issues, ignoring that career staff are
supposed to be part of the process.
Zinke’s Whitefish friend/neighbor’s two-person
company famously obtained a $300 million contract to repair Puerto
Rico’s electrical infrastructure after Hurricane Maria.
On key policy issues, Zinke, who justifies his
decisions to exploit public lands by speciously claiming to be a geologist,
is doing the bidding of energy industry lobbyists — except in Montana, where he is protecting
lands, perhaps with an eye to seeking higher office there. A conservative
political group tied to Pence has this year been running corny,
misleading campaign-style ads praising Zinke.
(Zinke concealed as a congressman that he’d been living in California, not Montana.)
In addition to all the corrupt and
self-aggrandizing behavior, there are other ways that Zinke is simply awful.
Prior to serving in Congress, Zinke, on a 2013 episode of his radio show,
hosted a birther and raised questions about President Obama’s college records.
According to high-ranking Interior staff
who spoke with CNN, Zinke has repeatedly stated
that he won’t focus on staff diversity, saying things like “diversity isn’t
important,” or “I don’t care about diversity,” or “I don’t really think that’s
important anymore.” Of the 33 senior career staff Zinke reassigned, 15 were
people of color.
After Callista Gingrich, Trump’s ambassador
to the Vatican and wife of Trump crony Newt Gingrich, expressed her deep offense when she read that a statue
of a nude person might be placed on the National Mall temporarily, Newt brought
Callista’s concerns to Zinke. Days later, the National Park Service, which
Zinke oversees, blocked the installation of the statue.
And Zinke, like Trump and Pruitt, has only hired
the best people.
- Zinke
staffer Christine Bauserman resigned after CNN documented inflammatory social
media remarks she made about Muslims, African-Americans, LGBT people, and
President Obama.
- A
top Zinke aide, Douglas Domenech, took meetings with his previous
employer, the Koch-connected Texas Public Policy Foundation, while it was
engaged in a legal dispute with the department. Doing so possibly violated
ethics rules. Adding to the sense that sense that something’s wrong here,
Interior spokeswoman Heather Swift, told The Guardian the
meetings were “primarily social in nature,” even though Domenech’s
calendar shows that the meetings concerned specific policy issues.
- Todd
Wynn, another top Zinke lieutenant, also scheduled a number of meetings with
representatives of his former industry group employers, again in possible
violation of federal ethics rules.
- Zinke’s
senior adviser Kathleen Benedetto, according to documents, held about
twice as many meetings with mining and fossil-fuel
companies as with environmental groups, and afterwards some of those
companies benefited directly from Trump administration actions weakening
public lands and wilderness protections.
- Indur
Goklany, a career Interior employee who is connected to the
climate-denying Heartland Institute and has said greenhouse gases are
“good news,” was tasked by senior Interior officials
early in the administration with rewriting the Department’s public
positions on climate change.
- Scott
Angelle, appointed under Trump to be Interior’s director of the Bureau of
Safety and Environmental Enforcement, has worked, at the urging of energy
companies, to repeal Obama-era safety rules,
including regulations issued after the deadly and costly Deepwater Horizon
oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico.
The parallels between the corrupt and ugly
behavior of Zinke and of Pruitt are so plain, and the Trump administration is
such a backstabbing disaster, that last month a Pruitt aide was caught trying
to divert attention from Pruitt’s ethics debacle by dishing dirt on Zinke.
Like Pruitt, Zinke still has his job probably
because he has slavishly worshipped two important masters, even above
worshipping himself: the fossil fuel and mining executives who are big donors
to the Republican Party, and, of course, the self-focused President Trump. Last
September Zinke told an oil industry group that nearly
one-third of Interior Department employees are not loyal to him and Trump. Maybe the
secretary was on to something there: With the disgraceful record Zinke has
compiled, who could blame them?
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.
It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the
source.
David Halperin
engages in public advocacy and advises organizations on strategy, policy,
politics, communications and legal matters. He is of counsel to
Public.Resource.org. He was previously: founding director of Generation
Progress and senior vice president at the Center for American Progress; senior
policy advisor for Howard Dean's presidential campaign; founding executive
director of the American Constitution Society; White House speechwriter and
special assistant for national security affairs to President Clinton; cofounder
of the internet company RealNetworks; and counsel to the Senate Intelligence
Committee. He graduated from Yale College and Yale Law School. His articles
have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Nation, Politico, Foreign
Policy and other outlets. Follow him on Twitter: @DaHalperin.
Donations can be sent to the
Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph:
410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has
always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The
master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class
has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
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