“He’s doing a lot of stuff we don’t agree with,” a White House official told him. Pruitt was “a knucklehead,” Chmielewski remembers Trump telling him. Unofficially, he would keep an eye on the new administrator, Scott Pruitt, the former Oklahoma attorney general whose questionable behavior was raising alarms. Officially, he would be the director of scheduling and advance. But within months, Chmielewski says, the White House asked him to consider moving to the EPA. He says he had his pick of jobs in the administration and, coming from a law-enforcement family, chose the Department of Homeland Security. With Trump, Chmielewski was finally on a winning team. Jared was helpful and pleasant, would never ask for anything. “But Ivanka, to the staff, was incredible. “I don’t stick up for Trump or the Trumps that much,” he says. 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. “My whole career has been no one knows and no one cares who Kevin Chmielewski is,” he says. 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. 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.
After all, it was Pruitt the FBI needed to speak with about a matter so urgent.Ĭhmielewski (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. 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. He’d just left a classified briefing about a matter of national security. When Kevin Chmielewski emerged from the FBI’s fortress of a headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C., his head was spinning.
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