Scott Pruitt, the swampiest Environmental Protection Administration secretary imaginable, has finally resigned while under numerous investigations. Predictably, Pruitt played the victim in his resignation letter and just as predictably, Fox News did its best to help him out.
July 6, 2018

Scott Pruitt, the swampiest Environmental Protection Administration secretary imaginable, has finally resigned while under numerous investigations. Predictably, Pruitt played the victim in his resignation letter and just as predictably, Fox News did its best to help him out.

It must have taken some thought for Fox correspondent John Roberts, who is not a bad reporter, by the way, to come up with something to back up Pruitt’s claim that “unprecedented” and “unrelenting attacks” on him and his family “have taken a sizeable toll” and thus caused him to resign. (Never mind that The New York Times says he was fired.)

But even as Roberts stressed more than once that Pruitt’s resignation was a case of “death by a thousand self-inflicted wounds,” he promoted an anecdote that suggested Roberts was being unfairly targeted by the liberal media.

Roberts slipped in the victimhood framing after noting that one of the Pruitt scandals involved a report that he had suggested Trump make him attorney general and fire current Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

ROBERTS: This idea that [Pruitt] reached out to the president personally to ask him to appoint him attorney general. Again, Scott Pruitt told me that that was 100 percent false. But then there was another story that he had asked his staff to try and get his wife a high-paying job, somewhere in the $200,000 range. It’s clear, though, there was just too much of a swirl of negative news around Scott Pruitt for this to last much longer.

Then, largely ignoring the numerous legal and ethical violations for which Pruitt has been under investigation, Roberts took the time to detail to host Trace Gallagher one (probably the only) instance in which Pruitt supposedly had been improperly maligned:

ROBERTS: If I can point out one other thing, too, Trace. In all the stories that were written about Scott Pruitt, there was one that really seemed to unfairly touch a member of his family. And that was his daughter, who had applied to the University of Virginia School of Law, back in early November of 2016. It was written in a very prominent newspaper that Scott Pruitt used his influence as the EPA administrator to get her into law school. But it turned out that that publication had the wrong date on a letter of reference from a former Virginia legislator and that she had actually applied to law school before the election and she was accepted to law school before he was nominated, before Pruitt was nominated to be the EPA administrator. So all of this swirl … unfairly swept up his daughter but it has had a significant impact on her.

The “prominent newspaper” Roberts referenced was The New York Times. But what Roberts failed to mention was that that same New York Times reported, without retraction, that Pruitt had instructed top EPA staffers to help his daughter obtain a highly-competitive and prestigious position as a White House intern last summer.

To Fox’s credit, Roberts was immediately followed by a much more elaborate report of Pruitt’s transgressions by correspondent Jennifer Griffin (not posted on FoxNews.com). On a later show, Roberts provided more details of Pruitt’s unethical tenure at the EPA for that included 14 ethics investigations plus a possible violation of the Official Records Act. On top of everything else, Pruitt allegedly deleted “meetings with certain companies and individuals from his calendar because they looked bad,” Roberts noted.

But really, Roberts only scratched the surface of Pruitt’s shockingly corrupt tenure. And Roberts never pointed out the equally shocking implications of the fact that Trump never cared.

Watch it abpve, from the July 5, 2018 Shepard Smith Reporting and below, from the July 5, 2018 Special Report.

Crossposted at News Hounds.
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