He exposed Scott Pruitt’s corruption. So why has the disgraced former EPA chief escaped justice while Kevin Chmielewski’s life is ruined?
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 one of our guys” to rein him in.
Chmielewski never forgot what Pruitt’s chief of staff, Ryan Jackson, told him when he arrived at the EPA: “My nightmare is now yours.” Even though he’d been in office for a few months, Pruitt had infuriated environmentalists and Democrats with his anti-science, industry-friendly stance, stripping any mention of climate change from EPA websites, rolling back regulations, and cozying up to the leaders of major fossil-fuel companies. Internally, though, Pruitt’s personal behavior was the problem Jackson spoke of. Excessive travel, first-class flights, decorating his office with paintings from the Smithsonian, an around-the-clock security detail, and requests for an armored car: Pruitt was one leak away from embarrassing the administration with any one of his indiscretions.
But after his classified FBI briefing, Chmielewski’s primary concern was getting Pruitt’s attention. What he’d learned from the bureau was the kind of information that kept you up at night, something Chmielewski believed a Cabinet secretary should know and act on immediately. “It was a massive deal,” he says. “Quite frankly I don’t sleep well.”
Jackson, Pruitt’s chief of staff, didn’t have a security clearance, so Chmielewski tried to convey the urgency of the situation without spilling any classified details, telling Jackson the FBI needed to speak with Pruitt.
“Kevin, stop,” Jackson said, according to Chmielewski’s recollection of events. “Do not say another word to Scott Pruitt about this.” Why? Chmielewski asked. “Plausible deniability,” Jackson replied.
Plausible deniability? Chmielewski was stunned. Was he trying to shield Pruitt from a matter of national security without even knowing what it was? (Jackson didn’t respond to a request for comment.) Undeterred, Chmielewski sought out Pruitt himself and found the administrator surrounded by a gaggle of aides. “Sir, I just met with the FBI,” he said. “They really didn’t want to meet with me. They wanted to meet with you.”
When Pruitt brushed him off, Chmielewski pressed harder. “Sir, I don’t think you understand,” he said. “Kevin,” Pruitt shot back, “I don’t think you understand.” Whatever it was, Pruitt didn’t want to know about it. End of story. (Pruitt didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Chmielewski — who told this story for the first time in interviews with ROLLING STONE — says he realized then that Pruitt was more than just self-absorbed or brazen: By refusing to be briefed on a matter of national security, he was dangerous. Chmielewski had already told others in the administration about some of Pruitt’s behavior, and his resolve now hardened. Over a span of months, he made dozens of disclosures to officials in the EPA, the White House, and other parts of the administration about Pruitt’s secrecy, spending habits, and abuses of power. Chmielewski didn’t realize it at the time, but he had become a whistleblower. “I had no idea really what a whistleblower was, what their rights were, when all this stuff was happening,” he says now. “It’s still weird to say I’m a whistle-blower. It feels like it’s a dirty word.”
What happened next still feels like a blur to him. After sounding the alarm internally, Chmielewski’s name leaked to Congress and the media. He got inundated with hundreds of requests for interviews as well as an invitation to testify on Capitol Hill. Chmielewski’s whistleblowing played a key role in exposing Pruitt’s wrongdoing and pressuring the administration to force Pruitt out.
“Whether [Chmielewski’s] policies were aligned with ours or not, clearly he had that moral compass to recognize what was going on was deeply unethical and deeply problematic,” says Adam Beitman of the Sierra Club. “We needed that at the time, and it’s a shame that there were so few people who did what he did.”
But while Pruitt remains a lawyer in good standing, and, for a time, a registered lobbyist in the state of Indiana, Chmielewski has watched his life fall apart. He was removed from the EPA building by an armed security guard. His friends from the Trump White House won’t return his calls and texts. No Republican campaign will hire him. When he sought protection under a federal whistleblower statute, he learned that as a political appointee he fell into a legal loophole. He then sued the EPA, saying the agency had violated his First Amendment free-speech rights as a citizen whistleblower. The lawyers for the Trump administration fought his case, only for the Biden administration to pick up where the Trump-era lawyers left off.
“I live paycheck to paycheck,” he says. “I’ve sold everything and am just making ends meet. These are the repercussions of doing the right thing.”
THE DRIVE FROM Washington, D.C., to Chmielewski’s home on Maryland’s Eastern Shore takes three hours, but the distance feels that much farther when you understand where Chmielewski is now compared with his years on the campaign trail or serving in the Trump administration. He works as a manager at a small golf-course restaurant called the Hideaway, a few miles inland from the boardwalk-lined beaches of Ocean City. He says he earns about $40,000 a year, less than a third of what he made at the EPA, and drives Uber and Lyft to make extra cash during the tourism offseason. His wife, Brianne, who had worked full-time raising their two children, drives the beer cart at the golf course. Since losing his EPA job, he’s drained his bank accounts and retirement funds to pay the bills and support his family. “I’m on the verge of bankruptcy,” he tells me, seated at a corner table in the restaurant one day this summer.
Spread out on the table is a collection of photos, letters, and other memorabilia from Chmielewski’s career as an advance man. Hand-signed thank-you letters from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. A personalized plaque from the 2016 Trump campaign. He shows them to me almost as proof of the life he’d once had.
Seated alongside his legal team, Chmielewski talks like a man who still hasn’t quite fathomed how he ended up where he is today. The words tumble out of him in a breathless rush, one story dissolving into the next, and when he feels like he’s not doing the story justice, he reaches for his cellphone, which doubles as an audiovisual archive of his life in politics. He searches for a clip from a Trump campaign rally and plays it for me.
A deafening roar fills a packed gymnasium. It’s April 20th, 2016. The venue is Chmielewski’s old high school, a few miles from where we’re sitting, in the town of Berlin, Maryland. Midway through the rally, Trump asks, “Where the hell is Kevin? He’s a star. Where is Kevin? Get Kevin up here.” Chants of “Kevin! Kevin! Kevin!” ring out as Chmielewski reluctantly appears onstage. “I haven’t paid for a drink in town since,” he says.
It was quite the homecoming for a guy who had barely graduated and had so little money growing up that he couldn’t afford his own senior-class yearbook. His mother raised him while working as a bartender, and his father was an electrician. He dreamed of working in the Secret Service, and spent two years in the Coast Guard to get the military service that would help him meet that dream, but he was honorably discharged to help care for his disabled brother. He met Rick Ahern, one of the most famous advance staffers in history. Ahern had staffed President Reagan when Reagan was shot outside the Washington Hilton. Ahern gave Chmielewski his first break, working advance on a trip for then-Vice President Dick Cheney. Grunt-level jobs for George W. Bush and other GOP bigwigs followed; one year, he donned a bunny suit for the annual White House Easter-egg-roll celebration. With each gig, Chmielewski found his place in the small fraternity of professional advance staffers.
Chmielewski spent so much time in close quarters with the people he worked for, carrying their confidences and ensuring their safety, that it was hard not to feel a familial kinship. When Mitt and Ann Romney, whom Chmielewski staffed during the 2012 presidential race, learned that he and his girlfriend had been together for more than a decade but hadn’t married, he says the Romneys insisted he propose before the campaign was over. As he tells this story to me, he pulls out his phone again and shows me a photo of him down on one knee, proposing to Brianne, the Romneys standing in the background, looking on like proud parents. On election night, Chmielewski recalls, Romney, who’d just delivered his concession speech, said to the group: “Guys, we didn’t lose. We’re getting Kevin married.”
It was while working for Romney that Chmielewski met Trump. According to Chmielewski, Trump turned to Corey Lewandowski a few months before launching his own presidential bid in 2015 and asked, “Who was that Polack that used to work for Romney? He was a good guy.” Trump called Chmielewski, offered him a job, and Chmielewski spent the next 18 months at Trump’s side. He planned Trump’s trips, safeguarded his cellphone, fetched his McDonald’s (two Big Macs and two Fish Filets with fries), and delivered the voice-of-God announcement that signaled Trump’s entrance at campaign rallies: “Please welcome the next president of the United States, Donald J. Trump!”
Chmielewski didn’t agree with everything Trump campaigned on, but he liked Trump’s vow to drain the swamp and end the country’s forever wars. Mostly, as he looked out on the massive crowds flocking to Trump’s rallies, he felt like he’d boarded a rocket ship just before liftoff, and intended to ride it all the way to the end. After Trump won, Chmielewski was told he would have his pick of jobs. He would finally get to make some real money working in the federal government instead of slinking back home to Maryland again.
When the White House asked him to leave his first choice at DHS after a few months and move to the EPA, the decision was a “no-brainer,” he tells me. The EPA job paid more than DHS. He had grown up on the water and thought of himself as a conservationist, a surfer, and a waterman (“wutterman,” in his Eastern Shore accent), someone who cared about protecting the natural landscape. The EPA also had a lower profile than DHS, and, as best he could tell, no one knew who Scott Pruitt, the new administrator, was. “I work less and make more money,” he says. “I just found the perfect boring job.”