“I wondered if they were emailing critical things about the agency on government time and how frequently they were corresponding about this”
Eric Lipton and Lisa Friedman write for The New York Times:
One of the top executives of a consulting firm that the Environmental Protection Agency has recently hired to help it with media affairs has spent the past year investigating agency employees who have been critical of the Trump administration, federal records show.
The firm, Definers Public Affairs, based in Virginia, specializes in conducting opposition research, meaning that it seeks to find damaging information on political or corporate rivals.
A vice president for the firm, Allan Blutstein, federal records show, has submitted at least 40 Freedom of Information Act requests to the EPA since President Trump was sworn in. Many of those requests target employees known to be questioning management at the EPA since Scott Pruitt, the agency’s administrator, was confirmed.
Blutstein, in an interview, said he was taking aim at “resistance” figures in the federal government, adding that he hoped to discover whether they had done anything that might embarrass them or hurt their cause.
“I wondered if they were emailing critical things about the agency on government time and how frequently they were corresponding about this,” he said. “And did they do anything that would be useful for Republicans.”
Jahan Wilcox, a spokesman at the EPA, said the decision to hire Definers, which signed a $120,000 no-bid contract to monitor and collect news coverage about the agency, was solely financial. The EPA previously contracted with Bulletin Intelligence LLC for media services at a rate of $207,000 a year. That contract was open to other bids.
“Definers was awarded the contract to do our press clips at a rate that is $87,000 cheaper than our previous vendor and they are providing no other services,” Wilcox said in an emailed statement. “If you have questions regarding how Definers operates, we encourage you to contact them.”
The contract, which was awarded this month, is part of an unconventional news media operation that Pruitt has set up at the agency as he tries to get a handle on the coverage of him by newspapers, including The New York Times, and criticism by Democrats in Congress and environmental groups. The decision to award the contract was first reported by Mother Jones.
The founders of Definers, Joe Pounder and Matt Rhoades, are longtime Republican political operatives. Pounder was the research director for the Republican National Committee and worked on the presidential campaign of Senator Marco Rubio of Florida in 2016. Rhoades managed Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012.
The two previously founded America Rising, a political action committee that works closely with Republicans. Mr. Blutstein serves as the vice president of Freedom of Information Act operations at America Rising and has filed the majority of his requests to the EPA via that organization.
Pounder said the EPA would use the company’s news-tracking tool called Definers Console. The firm had an improved way of collecting and analyzing clips, he said, noting that America Rising and Definers were distinct entities. America Rising, he said, “doesn’t and will never do work for the federal government”.
Blutstein, in the interview, said that his series of information requests this year targeting EPA employees known to be critical of the Trump administration was separate from the work that the firm was performing for the agency. Instead, he said that he filed the requests on his own, in an effort to try to undermine people who have been critical of policy changes taking place at the agency.
He described it as an “antiresistance” effort. “I am not doing mole hunts, or whatever,” he said. “I am almost always doing that research on my own.”
The requests focused on agency employees like Michael Cox, who worked in the EPA’s Seattle office and had sent a retirement notice in March to colleagues that raised questions about Pruitt’s management as well as agency employees who had participated in a public outreach program called “Why do you love the EPA”, which tried to build support for maintaining the agency’s budget.
Other employees who were the subjects of such requests included Elizabeth Southerland, who has been an outspoken critic of Pruitt since her recent retirement; Michael J. Mikulka, a Chicago-based union leader; and John O’Grady, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees Council 238.