Stringer / Reuters
Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt kept a “secret” calendar to hide meetings or calls that he and his aides feared would “look bad” if leaked to the public, according to one of his former staffers. Kevin Chmielewski, Pruitt’s former deputy chief of staff for operations, said EPA officials routinely met in Pruitt’s office to “scrub,” alter, or remove events from his official calendar. The offending meetings are said to include one in June 2017 between Pruitt and Cardinal George Pell, who was charged weeks later in Australia with multiple charges of sexual offenses. “We would have meetings what we were going to take off the official schedule. We had at one point three different schedules. One of them was one that no one else saw except three or four of us,” Chmielewski told CNN. “It was a secret... and they would decide what to nix from the public calendar.” If the allegations are true, keeping secret calendars and altering or deleting records of meetings could violate federal law as either “falsifying records” or hiding public records.