Oklahoma Republican Attorney General-elect Scott Pruitt speaks at a news conference in Oklahoma City, Friday, Jan. 7, 2011. Pruitt said he plans to file a lawsuit soon after he’s sworn into office on Monday to challenge the federal government over the new federal
health care law..(AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has just announced his resignation.

I have accepted the resignation of Scott Pruitt as the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Within the Agency Scott has done an outstanding job, and I will always be thankful to him for this. The Senate confirmed Deputy at EPA, Andrew Wheeler, will…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 5, 2018

BREAKING: @EPAScottPruitt resignation letter to @realDonaldTrump. Obtained by @johnrobertsFox: pic.twitter.com/A3ErO84hLQ

— Fin Gomez (@finnygo) July 5, 2018

This is a sad but foreseeable event. One could call it a Shakespearean tragedy in which a very competent official with a clear vision for EPA and an encyclopedic knowledge of the evil it was capable of was brought down by nothing more potent than his own hubris. But there is a farcical nature to the whole affair because the scandals that swirled about Pruitt were small, and banal, and ugly, and petit bourgeois in the extreme. They were scandals of appearance rather than scandals of import. And they were scandals of grasping for perks rather than large-scale graft or even corrupt policymaking.

Last summer, one of Scott Pruitt's senior schedulers was fired because she questioned the practice of retroactively deleting meetings from official calendars, an ex-EPA official tells NYT. She believed the deletions were illegal.https://t.co/08alJX28oG

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) July 5, 2018

Scott Pruitt placed a former political fundraising ally in charge of handling Freedom of Information Act requests for his office. Public records advocates say that's a glaring conflict of interest https://t.co/Ya89JeOIWp

— POLITICO (@politico) July 5, 2018

Scott Pruitt out @realDonaldTrump tweets he has accepted resignation Deputy EPA Administrator takes over. With 15 investigations into his ethics what finally did the trick?

— Andrea Mitchell (@mitchellreports) July 5, 2018

Eventually, the volume of the stench became too much to bear. And here we are.

This sets up another politically charged confirmation hearing and it will probably put on hold Pruitt’s agenda of pulling the EPA back from its self-ordained role of ruler of the nation. That is too bad, because he really moved the ball forward during his tenure and it will be hard to find someone else who can do the positive things Pruitt was doing.

Amazing thing about Scott Pruitt's resignation is that with so many allegations against him, he hung on so long–because POTUS liked his policies

— HowardKurtz (@HowardKurtz) July 5, 2018

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