Contempt: How Reagan's EPA head became the 1st cabinet-level official cited for contempt of Congress
Executive privilege: That’s a principle that has come up a lot in recent years, most recently regarding former President Donald Trump’s efforts to keep documents seized from the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago under wraps.
In the early 1980s, attorneys advising former President Ronald Reagan were looking for their own executive privilege test case, and they found it in Congressional requests for documents from the Environmental Protection Agency regarding a handful of Superfund sites.
They told EPA administrator Anne Gorsuch not to hand over the documents. When she complied, she ended up in more trouble than the White House advisors predicted and in the center of a perfect media storm that put pressure on the Reagan administration to change direction at the EPA.
It wasn’t just Gorsuch who ended up in hot water. By the end of the saga, one of her deputies would end up with a prison sentence.
The fourth episode of Captured breaks down the maelstrom at the EPA over the withheld documents, and what the documents — and the tussle itself — revealed about the inner workings of the agency meant to protect the environment and public health.
Full episode transcript
Scott Tong: ‘I smell a rat.’ When we left you, Congress was starting to get more than a whiff of scandal at the EPA; of polluters guarding the henhouse. And wouldn’t you know it, the more people whisper, the more the news media joins the chase.
Greg Gordon: What got me sort of into the environmental arena was a tip that there was an enormous dioxin problem — dioxin being maybe the most toxic chemical produced by man — in the state of Missouri.
Tong: This is Greg Gordon, long-time investigative reporter in Washington, D.C. And, full disclosure, my journalism professor in college … back in the early ‘90s. Now in the early ‘80s, Greg gets a crash course on this deadly family of chemicals: dioxin. It’s often a byproduct of industrial manufacturing, when a company makes a chemical or it burns something.
Gordon: I was writing for United Press International. I was a young investigative reporter at the time, working in the Washington bureau.
Tong: By 1982, the stench at the EPA is one of the biggest stories in town. Industrial toxins are turning up
