Trump's senior environmental nominee busted for plagiarizing her responses to Congress
Kathleen Harnett White, Trump's nominee for the White House's top environmental post. Image via screengrab.

On Tuesday, Democrats on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee claimed that President Donald Trump's nominee for the top White House environmental post appears to be guilty of plagiarism more than a dozen times over.


As the Washington Examiner reports, environment and public works committee Democrats said that in written responses to the committee's questions, Kathleen Hartnett White, who is nominated for to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality, gave answers to their questions that appeared to be copied "verbatim" from other Trump EPA officials, including the agency's administrator, Scott Pruitt. Those Democrats counted at least 18 instances that appeared to be copied from other EPA officials.

"We are troubled that it appears you have cut and pasted from the written answers of other nominees in your responses to questions that were submitted to you," those senators wrote in a letter to White published Tuesday.

Though the Republican majority of the committee advanced White in a party-line vote last month, she has not yet been confirmed by the full Senate.

A former chairwoman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, White's last employer was the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a group the Examiner describes as "a conservative think tank that has received funding from Koch Industries, Exxon Mobil, Chevron and other energy companies."

Democrats on the Environment and Public Works Committee staunchly oppose White due to her "views contrary to established science on climate change."

You can watch an example of those views below, in a video of White discussing "the benefits of CO2," via the Texas Public Policy Foundation.