But His Emails

Via Warren Terra, this detail from Rebecca Leber’s superb piece about Scott Pruitt is telling:

His emails: At his Senate confirmation hearing last year, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) asked Pruitt if he used a private email as attorney general. Pruitt answered he did not. Shortly after, Oklahoma reporter Phil Cross found that Pruitt had used a non-government email address in publicly released records. On top of the private email, groups such as the Oklahoma chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union are still fighting for the remainder of Pruitt’s emails with industry groups like Devon Energy. An earlier batch of emails revealed that Pruitt’s Oklahoma office thanked a Devon staffer with messages like, “You are so amazingly helpful!!!” while adopting much of Devon’s language as its own for a letter opposing Obama’s attempt to rein in methane leaks from drilling operations.

So, to review:

• Scott Pruitt used private emails as Attorney General.
• These private emails, unlike Clinton’s, had evidence of misconduct of substantial public interest.
• Pruitt committed a federal crime to cover up his use of private emails.

Given that the extraordinary volume of coverage of Hillary Clinton's email server was not a bad faith, selective attack on a single candidate using an issue virtually nobody has ever cared about ever before or ever since but represented sound journalistic judgment to cover an issue of great substantive interest and considerable purient interest to the public, I'm sure this story is about to get a huge amount of attention.

At least these emails didn’t tell us anything about how he’d act in office:

Controversial hires: Pruitt has stacked the EPA with industry representatives and Oklahoma friends. One of those hires was Albert Kelly, a former banker whose company issued mortgages to the Pruitt family and financed Pruitt’s stake in a minor league baseball team. Kelly was later banned from the banking industry for his alleged involvement in a loan that hadn’t received FDIC approval, around the same time Pruitt hired him to lead the EPA’s Superfund Task Force.