Volunteering to be the fall guy

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Scott Pruitt’s chief of staff said on Wednesday that he is responsible for giving two top aides big raises after the White House rejected the request.

Ryan Jackson said the move to use a special authority was all his, and Pruitt had nothing to do with it.

“Administrator Pruitt had zero knowledge of the amount of the raises, nor the process by which they transpired. These kind of personnel actions are handled by EPA's HR officials, [Presidential Personnel Office] and me,” Jackson said in a statement.

  The Hill

Sort of the Michael Cohen to Scott Pruitt. John Dowd also played the role for Trump until he'd had more than he could take and quit.

As The Atlantic previously reported, Pruitt asked the White House last month to approve raises for Greenwalt and Hupp, since they are political appointees, and the White House refused. So the EPA used a special authority under the Safe Drinking Water Act to give the raises.

Pruitt told Fox News last week that he was not involved in the process and he’d just found out about it when The Atlantic reported about the raises, and he reversed them.

“My staff did and I found out about that yesterday, and I changed it,” he said. “The officials that were involved in that process should not have done what they did.”

An email that suggests Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt personally signed off on a controversial pay raise for a favored aide last month is roiling the agency.

In the last few days, top staffers became aware of an email exchange between one of two aides who received such a raise and the agency’s human resources division. In mid-March, Sarah Greenwalt, senior counsel to the administrator, wrote to HR in an attempt to confirm that her pay raise of $56,765 was being processed. Greenwalt “definitively stated that Pruitt approves and was supportive of her getting a raise,” according to an administration official who has seen the email chain.

A second administration official confirmed the exchange. The email “essentially says, ‘The administrator said that I should get this raise,’” the official told me.

  The Atlantic

Now is Pruitt going to have to fire her?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.