Whistleblower on Trump EPA Chief Scott Pruitt Now Drives Uber

When Kevin Chmielewski emerged from the FBI’s fortress of a headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C., his head was spinning. It was the fall of 2017. He’d just left a classified briefing about a matter of national security. As he walked back to his office at the Environmental Protection Agency, Chmielewski knew what he had to do next: He had to tell his boss, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, to get over to the bureau and receive his own briefing as soon as possible. After all, it was Pruitt the FBI needed to speak with about a matter so urgent.

Chmielewski (pronounced shim-uh-LESS-ski) had gone to work at the EPA at the urging of his friends in the Trump White House, who wanted someone they trusted to keep an eye on Pruitt. Chmielewski had worked the 2016 campaign as an advance man for Donald Trump, one of the men and women in suits and earpieces who map out every trip, drive the candidate from event to event, and protect him as he walks through a crowd. Chmielewski liked to describe advance staffers as the Navy SEALs of politics: If they did their jobs well, no one would notice their presence or remember their name. “My whole career has been no one knows and no one cares who Kevin Chmielewski is,” he says.

Chmielewski looked the part of a SEAL — square-jawed, crew cut, with a surfer’s build, and tattoos sleeving his arms — but as an advance man he had none of the stability of a military job. He bounced from one campaign to the next every cycle, working mostly for prominent Republican candidates. Each time, he hoped that his boss’s victory would lead to a government job and a steady paycheck. Instead, he woke up out of work the day after the election — McCain in 2008, Romney in 2012. He packed up his car and headed back home to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, working odd jobs until the next candidate came calling.

In the time he worked for the Trump campaign, he fended off a protester who had rushed the stage in Dayton, Ohio, and guided Trump’s motorcade through a violent crowd in Fresno, California. He’d grown close with Trump’s kids. “I don’t stick up for Trump or the Trumps that much,” he says. “But Ivanka, to the staff, was incredible. Jared was helpful and pleasant, would never ask for anything. They were very easy to work for.”

With Trump, Chmielewski was finally on a winning team. He says he had his pick of jobs in the administration and, coming from a law-enforcement family, chose the Department of Homeland Security. But within months, Chmielewski says, the White House asked him to consider moving to the EPA. Officially, he would be the director of scheduling and advance. Unofficially, he would keep an eye on the new administrator, Scott Pruitt, the former Oklahoma attorney general whose questionable behavior was raising alarms. Pruitt was “a knucklehead,” Chmielewski remembers Trump telling him. “He’s doing a lot of stuff we don’t agree with,” a White House official told him. “We need…