Should Donald Trump ever tire of the baroque shenanigans of his EPA administrator and finally #BootPruitt, Pruitt's likely successor will be deputy administrator Andrew Wheeler. Emails unearthed by the Sierra Club through the Freedom of Information Act show how Wheeler courted Pruitt before his nomination and suggest that he, if elevated to the administrator’s bulletproof desk, would match the cavalier ethical standards of his predecessor.

Wheeler was a longtime staffer for James Inhofe, the anti-environmental firebrand senator from Oklahoma who also mentored Scott Pruitt. (Inhofe recently suggested that it was time for Pruitt to go but then recanted.) In 2009, Wheeler joined the K Street law firm of Faegre Baker Daniels, where he went to work lobbying for (among others) Murray Energy, the largest private coal company in the country and a very public opponent of environmental regulations proposed by the Obama administration. This background made him a natural for Trump’s EPA, and it was no surprise when Politico reported on March 16, 2017, that Trump was likely to appoint him to the deputy administrator post.  

The day before the Politico article, the emails show, Wheeler had invited Pruitt to be the keynote speaker at Faegre Baker Daniels’s annual “Energy and Environment Symposium”—a venue where he could presumably rub shoulders with Murray Energy and other clients with pending business before the EPA. Pruitt accepted and appeared at the May 24 event to share his “valuable insights.” 

In July, Wheeler solicited another appearance by Pruitt, this time at the Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives annual convention in Nashville. This time, Pruitt does not seem to have attended.

This may not violate technical ethics rules, says Virginia Canter, chief ethics counsel for the ethics-watchdog organization CREW, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, but it goes against a tradition set by previous administrations. “Typically when you’re in the process of nominating somebody, you try to put a hold on their interactions with the agency,” says Canter. “It looks like he was acting to cozy up to Pruitt.” 

Wheeler’s attempts to court Pruitt for speaking engagements were not his only apparent attempt to grease his nomination. The Intercept reported in February that Wheeler had hosted campaign fundraisers, also in May 2017, for John Barrasso (R-WY) and James Inhofe. Both senators sit on the Senate committee—Environment and Public Works—that would make a preliminary decision on his EPA confirmation. 

Wheeler’s careful preparations bore fruit in November 2017, when the committee approved his nomination, which was confirmed by the Senate in February 2018. To assume the post, Wheeler presumably obtained a waiver from President Trump’s executive order barring lobbyists from participating in “any particular matter” for which they had lobbied in the previous two years. The EPA, however, did not respond to a request for comment on that matter, or on the propriety of Wheeler’s interactions with Pruitt.