Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Scott Pruitt was directly involved in wiping scientific data relating to climate change and air pollution, according to documents and correspondence obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by environmentalist activists, ThinkProgress reported Monday.
Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) was investigating the removal and modification of thousands of pages of data that began disappearing soon after President Donald Trump took office. The organization was particularly interested in an apparent purge of the agency’s web page on the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which detailed the then-administration’s plan to tackle carbon emissions.
The EDF discovered emails from J.P. Freire, Pruitt’s associate administrator for public affairs, asking staff to archive web pages related to “climate change, “climate change science,” or “climate change impacts.”
“We appreciate your assistance in this time-sensitive manner,” Freire said in an email dated April 28, 2017.
Pruitt’s senior advisor Lincoln Ferguson emailed Freire to express the agency head’s insistence that the information shuffle happen a lot quicker. Read more…