"'[T]he string of FOIA documents following the Sierra Club’s lawsuit [w]as 'the silver bullet' that ended Pruitt," says a Trump administration official, according to The Hill. Last summer, Sierra Club's Environmental Law Program filed four Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests seeking the external emails of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, three of his top aides, and his scheduling and advance team. This summer, after one ELP lawsuit, 60,000 pages of documents produced as a result, and dozens of news articles reporting nearly daily on the bombshell information they contained, Pruitt is out. The documents obtained through ELP litigation revealed scandals both petty ($1560 spent on fountain pens?!) and criminal (using taxpayer resources to seek a Chik-Fil-A franchise for his wife), along with seemingly endless examples of Pruitt kowtowing to corporate polluters, thwarting transparency, and using the office for his own enrichment.
What’s saddening is that Pruitt’s policies to gut the bedrock laws and protections that keep our families safe didn’t cause anyone in the Trump Administration or the Republican Congress to even blink. But we’re grateful these documents helped show the public exactly who Scott Pruitt is and that he was working for no one but corporate polluters and himself. The point of the Freedom of Information Act is to ensure the public knows some truth about who is running our government and how they are running it, and, in this case, it worked and that truth was stunning.
Senior Attorney Elena Saxonhouse has led overall strategy and coordination of Sierra Club's FOIA work. Staff Attorney Matthew Miller is the litigating attorney on the lawsuit that forced EPA to turn over the documents, along with pro bono attorney Justine Cowan. Sierra Club has six other FOIA lawsuits currently pending against the Trump Administration.
Check out the official Sierra Club press release here.