SAN FRANCISCO — The man known for chanting "lock her up" at the 2016 Republican National Convention says he was shoved out of his EPA job Wednesday for being too bipartisan.
Michael Stoker, an agricultural attorney from Santa Barbara who had been serving as regional administrator since May 2018, said he was fired Wednesday morning by associate deputy administrator Doug Benevento and EPA chief of staff Ryan Jackson, whom POLITICO reported last month is planning to take a job with the National Mining Association.
"Five minutes after they hung up on me, they disabled my EPA phone and laptop," he told POLITICO in an interview. "A 64-year-old presidential appointee in an election year does not resign to do nothing," he said.
"Everyone knows that, so I'm not going to give you that resignation. I'll give you a resignation if you give me a reason."EPA's Region 9 covers Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada and the Pacific Islands. The agency under current Administrator Andrew Wheeler as well as previous Administrator Scott Pruitt has sought to revoke California's authority to set stricter-than-federal environmental rules, including greenhouse gas standards for passenger vehicles.
D.C.-based EPA officials appeared to have a falling out with their San Francisco-based Region 9 office last fall after Wheeler told California the state was responsible for water pollution by allowing homelessness to grow in major cities.
San Francisco officials had an all-hands meeting with staff — minus Stoker — on the day Wheeler sent his letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom, and they spurned the national office's approach, according to The New York Times. Region 9 staff subsequently told California state officials that the letter was purely political and that their office wasn't responsible, though Stoker defended the Wheeler letter.
Stoker said he didn't know why he was forced out but hypothesized it could be because of his working relationships with congressional Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose San Francisco district contains a Superfund site at the former Hunters Point naval shipyard.
"It's well known and it's very public that I had a very good relationship with Speaker Pelosi," he said.
"She had real problems when I came in on Hunters Point and I turned that around."He said that three weeks ago someone in EPA headquarters said, "kind of like it was a bad thing, 'Mike, it hasn't gone unnoticed how you're getting a lot of Democrat members of Congress who are saying good things about you.'"
Stoker also hypothesized that Trump might have a new appointee in mind, but said it wouldn't make sense to have him step down without someone else waiting in the wings.
"This is an election year; you don't do things like this in an election year," he said. "They sure wouldn't tell me on the phone call when I asked. It only makes sense almost like if the White House were to call."
EPA initially offered no comment on Stoker's departure. But hours after Stoker spoke to POLITICO and other outlets, the agency issued a blistering response that accused him of incompetence.
"All our regional administrators work in a bipartisan way in their regions," EPA spokesperson Corry Schiermeyer said. "Although travel and accessibility to state partners in an important and expansive region like the southwest is vital, Mike was too interested in travel for the sake of travel and ignored necessary decision making required of a regional administrator.
"Although EPA leadership repeatedly requested Mike to simply conduct the basic responsibilities of his job, we regretfully and ultimately after many requests had to relieve him for severe neglect and incompetent administration of his duties. His excuses and stories are simply all made up, and we cannot allow them to go without response."
Stoker said late Thursday that he was encouraged to travel across Region 9 as part of his job. Last year, EPA chief of staff Ryan Jackson dismissed an inspector general finding that Stoker spent a fraction of his work days at Region 9 headquarters, saying, "The work all of our regional administrators do, frankly, is very portable."
In response to EPA's Thursday accusations, Stoker said, "The bottom line is, what they've issued is 100 percent a lie."
He sent a letter Thursday to Region 9 staff in which he praised EPA staff and said his firing was likely due to personality clashes. "[W]hen I asked for the reason for the termination there was a long pause and was only told it wasn’t personal," he wrote. "Frankly I have a gut feeling it is and was 100% personal."
"I believed I had the best job in America and the only times it was very frustrating it always had something to do with HQ over matters I had no control or input," he wrote.
Stoker had originally been dissatisfied with having to commute to EPA's regional headquarters in San Francisco from his Santa Barbara County home, but Jackson gave Stoker special permission last year to work from Los Angeles. Since then, he said, he's had clashes with Benevento in particular, and he said that EPA headquarters was both micromanaging the regional office and not keeping it apprised of developments.
"A regional administrator, in my opinion, should be aware of anything that's going to come down from headquarters that's going to affect his or her region," he said. "That hasn't happened in certain circumstances."
He said he would disclose more details of his disagreements with agency leadership after Trump leaves office.
"There'll be a time and place and we'll get into the specifics," he said. "As long as this president's in office, it's not the time and place. I could see me writing the book some day: 'Inside the Trump administration.' Underneath it it would be, 'If only the president knew.'"
Alex Guillén contributed to this report.