The courts, for instance, found that the E.P.A. had ignored clear legal statutes when they ruled that Mr. Pruitt had illegally delayed a regulation curbing methane emissions from new oil and gas wells and that the agency had broken the law by missing a deadline last year to enact ozone restrictions.
In other cases — including one in which a federal court ordered the E.P.A. to act on a Connecticut request to reduce pollution from a Pennsylvania power plant, and one where judges demanded quick action from the agency on new lead paint standards — the courts warned Mr. Pruitt that avoiding enacting regulations already on the books was an inappropriate effort to repeal a rule without justifying the action.
“The E.P.A. has a clear duty to act,” a panel of judges of the San Francisco-based Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit wrote in a 2-1 decision finding that the agency must revise its lead paint standards in 90 days, as regulations required. The agency had tried to delay the revisions for six years.
In an interview on Friday, the White House spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said that Mr. Trump felt that Mr. Pruitt had done a satisfactory job at the EPA. Her comments suggested that Mr. Pruitt’s work checking off items on the president’s agenda — including rolling back a large number of environmental protections — may weigh heavily as a counterbalance to the ethics questions related to his travel expenses, management practices and his rental of a living space from the wife of a prominent lobbyist.
Describing Mr. Trump’s view of Mr. Pruitt, she said: “He likes the work product.”
While Security spending was somewhat more than his predecessor, Scott Pruitt has received death threats because of his bold actions at EPA. Record clean Air Water while saving USA Billions of Dollars. Rent was about market rate, travel expenses OK. Scott is doing a great job!
Liz Bowman, an E.P.A. spokeswoman, disputed the criticisms of the agency’s work. “E.P.A. does its due diligence, consults with O.M.B. and other federal agencies to ensure that its work is legally defensible,” she said in an email, referring to the Office of Management and Budget, the office that coordinates and evaluates policy across the executive branch.
One of the chief examples cited by Mr. Pruitt’s critics came this week when the E.P.A. filed its legal justification for what is arguably the largest rollback of an environmental rule in the Trump administration: the proposed undoing of an Obama-era regulation aimed at cutting pollution of planet-warming greenhouse gases from vehicle tailpipes.
Mr. Pruitt made his case for the rollback in a 38-page document filed on Tuesday that, experts say, was devoid of the kind of supporting legal, scientific and technical data that courts have shown they expect to see when considering challenges to regulatory changes.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
“There’s an incredible lack of numbers,” said James McCargar, a former senior policy analyst at the E.P.A. who worked on vehicle emissions programs and remains in close touch with career staffers who work on those programs. “If this gets challenged in court, I just don’t see how they provide anything that gives a technical justification to undo the rule.”
PhotoProtesters the E.P.A. this month. Environmental groups have cheered the agency’s losses in the courts on regulation rollbacks concerning issues like pesticides and lead paint. Credit
Andrew Harnik/Associated Press
The rules Mr. Pruitt is targeting would require automakers to nearly double the average fuel economy of passenger vehicles to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. Automakers have argued the rule is onerous, forcing them to invest heavily in building hybrid and electric vehicles.
As part of the process, Mr. Pruitt filed the 38-page document, which is meant to supply the government’s legal justification for rolling back the rule. About half the document consists of quotations from automakers laying out their objections to the rule. By comparison, the Obama administration’s 1,217-page document justifying its implementation of the regulation included technical, scientific and economic analyses justifying the rule.
Experts in environmental policy said the lack of analytical arguments in this week’s E.P.A. filing surprised them. “This document is unprecedented,” said Mr. McCargar, the former E.P.A. senior policy analyst. “The E.P.A. has just never done anything like this.”
John M. DeCicco, a professor of engineering and public policy at the University of Michigan Energy Institute, said the filing was a departure from the practices of previous Republican and Democratic administrations.
“A president or an administrator or somebody can’t just say, ‘I’m going to change the rule,’ without justifying it very, very carefully,” Mr. DeCicco said. “As a scientist who’s worked on these issues, I’m saying, where are the numbers? Where’s the data?”
Most of the document consists of arguments quoting directly from public comments made by automaker lobbyists, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and the Global Automakers, that the pollution rules will be unduly burdensome on the auto industry, as well as public comments from Toyota, Fiat Chrysler, Mercedes-Benz and Mitsubishi.
While it does include arguments opposing the regulatory rollback from groups including the Union of Concerned Scientists and the state of California, it does not contain what environmental experts say is the critical element of a legally strong justification for changing an E.P.A. regulation: Technical analysis of both sides of the argument leading to a conclusion aimed at persuading a judge that the change is defensible.
Seth Michaels, a spokesman for the Union of Concerned Scientists, suggested that, in its reuse of arguments by the automakers’ lobby, the emissions-rollback document echoed Mr. Pruitt’s modus operandi when he was the Oklahoma Attorney General.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
“It’s reminiscent of the 2011 letter Scott Pruitt sent as Oklahoma AG to the E.P.A., in which he took a letter drafted by lawyers for Devon Energy and stuck his name on it with minimal edits,” Mr. Michaels said.
A 2014 investigation by The Times found that lobbyists for Devon Energy, an Oklahoma oil and gas company, drafted letters for Mr. Pruitt to send to the E.P.A., the Interior Department, the Office of Management and Budget and President Obama, outlining the economic hardship of various environmental rules.
Between 2011 and 2017, Mr. Pruitt filed suit against the E.P.A. 14 times, and lost almost all of the cases.
Most were filed in conjunction with the Republican attorneys general of a dozen or more other states, making it difficult to know precisely which legal arguments his office contributed, legal experts said. Mr. Pruitt frequently took a lead role in the cases.
In the end, “a lot of those arguments were losers,” said Richard L. Revesz, an expert in environmental law at New York University.
In particular, Mr. Revesz noted a case brought by the group against President Obama’s signature climate change regulation, the Clean Power Plan, which Mr. Pruitt is now working to overturn from within the E.P.A. The lawsuit challenged a draft proposal of the regulation, which was an unprecedented move that a federal court quickly struck down, saying that they could not legally challenge a draft.
PhotoA site operated by Devon Energy near Stillwater, Okla. A 2014 investigation by The Times found that lobbyists for Devon had drafted letters for Mr. Pruitt to send to President Barack Obama. Credit
Nick Oxford for The New York Times
While the attorneys general, including Mr. Pruitt, garnered media attention for the case, “The argument they had was ludicrous,” Mr. Revesz said.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
The group did, however, score one major victory: After the Obama administration issued its final version of the Clean Power Plan, it successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to temporarily halt implementation of the rule.
Since taking the helm of E.P.A., Mr. Pruitt has barnstormed the country, meeting with farmers, coal miners and local leaders and promising an end to his predecessor’s regulatory approach. He also has favored closed-door policy speeches to conservative think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation, to roll out policy initiatives.
The Heritage Foundation was the venue Mr. Pruitt chose this year to say that he would make changes to how scientific studies are considered at the agency. Both critics and supporters of Mr. Pruitt said that, by making the proposal in a political fashion rather than changing the rules in a quieter but potentially more lasting way means that changes like these are more vulnerable to being undone by a future administration.
Environmental groups have welcomed Mr. Pruitt’s court losses. Joanne Spalding, chief climate counsel for the Sierra Club, said she was pleased by what she called “sloppy” and “careless” E.P.A. legal work. “It’s fine with us,” she said. “Do a bad job repealing these things, because then we get to go to court and win.”
Thomas J. Pyle, a supporter of Mr. Pruitt’s and the president of the Institute for Energy Research, a think tank that promotes fossil fuels, described that as spin. “The environmental left portrays Scott Pruitt as a devil incarnate in their fund-raising solicitations, yet brag about how ineffective he is in dismantling Obama’s climate rules,” he said. “Which is it?”
Still, some conservatives said they were worried that Mr. Pruitt was more interested in media attention than policy and feared more legal losses. “If the goal is to generate temporary relief and to make a splash, then what they’re doing is terrifically fine,” said Jonathan H. Adler, director of the Center for Business Law Regulation at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.
But if the Trump administration wants to permanently change the regulatory environment for business, he said, the E.P.A. cannot take such a “quick and dirty approach” to unraveling regulations. “I’m suspicious that two, three years down the road there’s going to be much to show for all the fireworks we’re getting now,” Mr. Adler said.
Not long after the two brothers had been arrested for gunning down their parents in their multimillion-dollar mansion in Beverly Hills, 21-year-old Lyle Menendez put pen to paper to tell his brother what was on his mind.
In a 17-page letter in 1990, Menendez told his teen brother, Erik, that he wanted to stay together.
“My greatest fear is that we would not end up in the same prison down the road,” he wrote, according to a 1996 article in the Los Angeles Times. “I think if Dad could give us one piece of advice that night in August, it would be never to abandon each other, no matter what the circumstance.”
After years in criminal court, the Menendez brothers were convicted in 1996 of murdering their parents and sentenced to life behind bars.
The two were sent to the same California processing center, then split up, according to the Times. Lyle was taken to a prison near Tehachapi, and Erik was taken to a prison near Sacramento, 100 miles away. At the time, a spokeswoman for California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation told the newspaper that authorities were complying with protocol to keep crime partners apart.
“This will make their life sentences even more miserable,” Deputy Public Defender Terri Towery told the newspaper at the time. “I think it’s really, really sad and I’m sorry that our society has become so vindictive.”
Now, for the first time in more than two decades, the Menendez brothers are back in the same place — a housing unit at Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility outside San Diego, where the inmates are “able to interact with one another as they pursue rehabilitation opportunities,” corrections department spokeswoman Terry Thornton told The Washington Post.
Lyle, now 50, was transferred in February to the prison, where his brother had been for years, Thornton said. Then on Wednesday, she said, Erik, 47, was moved into the same housing unit at the prison where his brother is held.
It has been nearly 30 years since the Menendezes’ lives unraveled on a Sunday night in August 1989.
Authorities said the two brothers had bought two 12-gauge shotguns and two movie tickets for “Licence to Kill” — their alibi, according to the Los Angeles Times. Then, police said, the brothers opened fire on their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez, as the couple watched TV in the library in their Beverly Hills home.
Erik Menendez initially said he and his brother had been out that night and, when they returned home and discovered their slain parents, “I was going through convulsions. I had never seen my dad helpless before. When we first walked into the room, I said, ‘No!’ ” according to a family profile published in the Times.
Lyle said that when he saw the scene, “I just entered into my dad’s mode” and took control of the family’s affairs.
Prosecutors said their father, a 45-year-old Hollywood executive, was struck six times, once in the back of his head; their mother was hit 10 times, including in the face, according to the Times.
“I’ve been in this business 33 years and I’ve heard of few killings as savage as this one,” Marvin D. Iannone, then the Beverly Hills police chief, told the Associated Press in 1990.
The double-murder case captured international attention as two wealthy young men, who had lived privileged lives filled with private school education and amateur tennis tours, faced a future in prison, or no future at all.
The trial started in 1993 and ended in two deadlocked juries in 1994. The case was retried in 1995.
Throughout the years-long legal saga, attorneys for the brothers alleged that they had been neglected by their mother and emotionally and sexually abused by their father. Erik’s attorney, Leslie Abramson, argued that her client “could not take the worst of it anymore” and “went to his frankly equally screwed-up brother for help,” according to the AP.
“This is what happened,” Abramson told jurors, pointing to gruesome photos from the crime scene.
But prosecutors said the brothers, who were described by those who knew them as confident and somewhat cocky, killed their wealthy parents to inherit their large fortune.
“Erik feared, all right,” prosecutor Lester Kuriyama told the jurors, according to the AP. “He feared he’d have to get off his butt and work like the rest of us.”
In 1996, the brothers were convicted of first-degree murder.
As the verdicts were announced shortly before noon, Erik Menendez, 25, grasped the hand of defense attorney Leslie Abramson, looked toward the courtroom ceiling and then cast his eyes downward. Another defense attorney, Barry Levin, draped his arm across Erik’s shoulders to comfort him.
Older brother Lyle Menendez, 28, rested his chin in his hand, keeping his dark eyes fixed straight ahead.
Weeks later, after much deliberation, the brothers were sentenced to life in prison — avoiding the death penalty.
“It’s just a tremendous relief when you hear those words … life without parole,” Lyle’s attorney, Charles Gessler, said during a news conference at the time, according to the Los Angeles Times. “Lyle is relieved because he wants to live.”
The Menendez brothers were processed at the North Kern State Prison in Delano, west of the Sequoia National Forest. Thornton, the spokeswoman for the corrections department, said that was the last time the brothers were in the same facility, until now.
When asked about the brothers’ reunion, Thornton said she could not comment on the inmates’ personal lives. But she confirmed that the two men now have access to each other.
Correction: A previous version of this article referred to Marvin D. Iannone as being the Los Angeles police chief at the time of the slayings. He was the police chief of Beverly Hills.
