The woman who publicly confronted Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt in a restaurant this week said Tuesday that officials should “want to hear from the public.”
“If they are doing their jobs well, they should want to hear from the public, and I was there to talk to Scott,” Kristin Mink said on MSNBC. “It was a completely civil conversation — turned out to be a bit of a one-way conversation, but that was his call.”
{mosads}Mink’s comments came a day after she shared a video of a confrontation with Pruitt while he was eating lunch in downtown Washington, D.C.
In the video, Mink lists many of the controversies Pruitt has been tied up in since he took over as head of the EPA and urges him to resign over “what [he’s] doing to the environment.”
“We deserve to have somebody at the EPA who actually does protect our environment, someone who believes in climate change and takes it seriously for the benefit of all us, including our children,” Mink said in the video. “I would urge you to resign before your scandals push you out.”
The video had been viewed more than 270,000 times on Facebook as of Tuesday afternoon as well as picked up in multiple media reports.
Mink, who is a schoolteacher, according to her Facebook profile, said that being with her child at the restaurant partly motivated her to confront Pruitt.
“Here’s the man who’s literally sacrificing our children’s future for short-term personal gain,” she said on MSNBC. “It’s disgusting.”
Amid a debate over civility in politics, Mink was asked if her confrontation adds to the narrative that Trump Cabinet officials are being unfairly harassed in public. Mink said she can’t control that perception. But she insisted that officials should want to hear from the public and called it her “right as a citizen.”
Mink’s encounter with Pruitt comes after multiple Trump administration officials faced public protest while dining out in June. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a Virginia restaurant by a manager who said the Trump administration is “inhumane and unethical.”
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) drew outrage from Republican and Democratic lawmakers last week after she called for public confrontations of administration officials to continue. President Trump falsely claimed Waters urged people to harm his supporters in confrontation. Waters also said she was forced to cancel public events last weekend because of a serious death threat she faced.
Pruitt is facing widespread scrutiny for actions as the EPA chief.
The top ethics official at the EPA, Kevin Minoli, called for an investigation into Pruitt over the weekend. The New York Times reported that in a letter, Minoli asked for investigations into Pruitt’s rental of a Capitol Hill condominium, taxpayer spending on travel and allegations that Pruitt had an aide help him with personal matters.
Reports that the EPA spent $3.5 million on security during Pruitt’s first year also faced critical public backlash. A spokesman for the EPA has contended that the amount spent was necessary because of the “unprecedented amount of death threats against [Pruitt].”