“Kevin Chmielewski, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) whistleblower who played a central role in Scott Pruitt’s downfall at the agency, said he feels vindicated by the administrator’s departure,” The Hill reports.

Said Chmielewski: “I hate to take a credit for a man losing his job, but I guess I’d have to say that I take the credit.”

“In the final hours of Scott Pruitt’s tenure as administrator, the Environmental Protection Agency moved on Friday to effectively grant a loophole that will allow a major increase in the manufacturing of a diesel freight truck that produces as much as 55 times the air pollution as trucks that have modern emissions controls,” the New York Times reports.

“The move by the E.P.A. came after intense lobbying by a small set of manufacturers that sell glider trucks, which use old engines built before new technologies significantly reduced emissions of particulates and nitrogen oxide that are blamed for asthma, lung cancer and other ailments.”

Daily Beast: “Though well-liked by Trump until recently, Pruitt routinely alienated many senior staff members and would-be allies. Their subsequent press leaks and congressional whistleblowing made Pruitt too much of a liability even for Trump.”

“It was the defensiveness evident in his letter to the president that led to a routine mistreatment of his subordinates that led them to speak out—and may have sealed his fate.”

“The litany of former staffers with an ax to grind kept Pruitt controversy in the headlines for months, eventually managing to exhaust President Trump’s patience, White House sources say. Even Fox News, the reliably supportive cable news outlet from which the president often gleans political advice, had turned on Pruitt by the end.”

President Trump tweeted that he has accepted the resignation of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.

Los Angeles Times: “The departure of the anti-regulatory crusader ends a bizarre and tumultuous chapter of the Trump administration that puzzled even some of the president’s staunchest supporters.”

“The spendthrift EPA chief has been a political liability for the White House for months, drawing the attention of federal investigators with scandal after scandal, many of which were linked to his lavish spending of taxpayer money and the use of his position to enrich his family. Pruitt leaves the post the target of more than a dozen official probes.”

Fox News quotes from Pruitt’s resignation letter to Trump:

It is extremely difficult for me to cease serving you in this role first because I count it a blessing to be serving you in any capacity, but also, because of the transformative work that is occurring.

However, the unrelenting attacks on me personally and my family, are unprecedented and have taken a sizable toll on all of us.

EPA chief Scott Pruitt “is now facing questions about whether aides deleted sensitive information about his meetings from his public schedule and potentially violated the law in doing so,” the New York Times reports.

“Last summer one of his senior schedulers, Madeline G. Morris, was fired by Mr. Pruitt’s former deputy chief of staff, Kevin Chmielewski, who said he let her go because she was questioning the practice of retroactively deleting meetings from the calendar. Mr. Chmielewski has emerged as a harsh critic of Mr. Pruitt after a bitter falling out that led to his departure from the agency as well.”

EPA administrator 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, CNN reports.

Said Kevin Chmielewski, Pruitt’s former deputy chief of staff for operations: “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.”

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt was publicly confronted by a teacher who urged him to resign in the middle of a dinner at a restaurant in Washington, the Daily Mail reports.

New York Times: “The chief ethics officer of the Environmental Protection Agency — the official whose main job is to help agency staffers obey government ethics laws — has been working behind the scenes to push for a series of independent investigations into possible improprieties by Scott Pruitt, the agency’s administrator, a letter sent this week says.”

Daily Beast: “On May 18, a top aide to EPA chief Scott Pruitt testified to a congressional committee that she had been tasked with procuring her boss a used mattress from the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. Just days after news of that testimony broke, the aide, Pruitt’s now former director of scheduling Millan Hupp, submitted her resignation. But even though Hupp was gone from the agency, Pruitt wasn’t done with her.”

“According to three sources familiar with the conversations, Pruitt was livid over Hupp’s testimony, which he felt had been particularly humiliating. And he personally reached out to allies in the conservative movement, including some at the influential legal group the Federalist Society, to insist that she had lied about, or at least misunderstood, the request for a used Trump mattress. He also stressed that Hupp could not be trusted—the implication being that she should not be hired at their institutions.”

“An examination of Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt’s government email accounts has uncovered only one message he wrote to anyone outside EPA during his first 10 months in office — a number that has watchdogs questioning whether he is communicating in private,” Politico reports.

“EPA says Pruitt mainly holds discussions in person or over the phone, which would explain the meager electronic trail for his external communications. But Pruitt’s critics remain suspicious — especially in light of all the steps the agency has taken to conceal his activities, from refusing to release his meeting calendars to installing a $43,000 soundproof booth in his office.”

“Senior staff members at the Environmental Protection Agency frequently felt pressured by Scott Pruitt, the administrator, to help in personal matters and obtain special favors for his family, according to interviews with four current and former E.P.A. officials who served as top political aides to Mr. Pruitt,” the New York Times reports.

“The officials said that Mr. Pruitt, who ‘had a clear sense of entitlement,’ in the words of one of them, indicated that he expected staff members’ assistance with matters outside the purview of government.”

The aides said that Pruitt “told them that he expected a certain standard of living akin to wealthier Trump Cabinet members. The aides felt as if Mr. Pruitt—who is paid about $180,000 a year—saw them as foot soldiers in achieving that lifestyle.”

“Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, is expected on Friday to send President Trump a detailed legal proposal to dramatically scale back an Obama-era regulation on water pollution… It is widely expected to be one of his agency’s most significant regulatory rollback efforts,” the New York Times reports.

“And, as soon as Monday, the same official said, Mr. Pruitt is expected to publish another major change: his agency’s legal proposal to gut President Barack Obama’s rule to reduce climate-warming pollution from vehicle tailpipes. That proposal risks triggering a court battle with California and raises the prospect that the American car market could be split in two, with different groups of states enforcing different pollution rules.”

EPA chief Scott Pruitt “last year had a top aide help contact Republican donors who might offer his wife a job, eventually securing her a position at a conservative political group that has backed him for years,” the Washington Post reports.

“The job hunt included Pruitt’s approaching wealthy party supporters and conservative figures with ties to the Trump administration. The individuals said he enlisted Samantha Dravis, then serving as associate administrator for the EPA’s Office of Policy, to line up work for his wife.”