Image: Last Week Tonight
As someone who paid rent near Capitol Hill for a few years, Scott Pruitt’s brand of corruption has particularly offended me: The Environmental Protection Agency chief was found to be renting a condo from a lobbyist for a measly $50 per night.As we’ve detailed before, Pruitt is an EPA chief who has spent most of his career suing (and losing to) the EPA; we’d thought his sole goal in the position was to roll back every Obama-era environmental regulation, but reporting by the New York Times and others shows a secondary goal of looting taxpayers while he’s at it.
Pruitt abused a loophole to give EPA staffers raises, demanded a 20-person security detail, had a motorcade take him to a middling, overrated DC restaurant because he was running late, and retaliated against EPA employees who called him out on it. There’s also the renting-a-hilariously-underpriced-condo-from-lobbyists thing, to which Pruitt said: “Craigslist today shows rentals of one bedroom for less than $1,000.”For these deeds, Pruitt earned the John Oliver segment you see above. Oliver’s staff spent some time seeing what $50 per night gets you on Capitol Hill on Airbnb. It’s bleak. A couch named “Black Beauty,” a bed seemingly jammed into a hallway, and a tiny bedroom with barely enough space for a desk lamp. I paid $950 for one room in a five-bedroom row house 15 blocks off Capitol Hill five years ago and it was a steal. It takes a special kind of person to lie about easily Googleable facts and think no one is going to call you on it.Pruitt is so unliked, Oliver said, that “even Mickey and Minnie Mouse would tell to go fuck himself.”