Veteran GOP Dirt Digger Hired to Protect It at Trump's EPA

By Brett Dahlberg and Sarah Kerr

A former political operative whose resume boasts of decades of mudslinging achievements on behalf of Republican candidates is working as a top official at the Environmental Protection Agency office overseeing New York and New Jersey.

Christopher Lyon, a veteran New York-based campaign consultant whose chief expertise is opposition research on behalf of the GOP, was hired as the $118,085-a-year chief of staff to EPA Region 2 administrator Pete Lopez in December, an agency spokesman confirmed.

The local office is considered one of the most active EPA units in the country, responsible for monitoring some 219 Superfund sites, overseeing federal environmental grants and tracking pollution benchmarks in the two states plus Puerto Rico, the U.S Virgin Islands and eight Indian Tribal Nations.

In a five-page resume submitted for his job application and obtained from the EPA under the federal Freedom of Information Act, Lyon made no mention of interest or experience in the environment. Instead, he highlighted his years of work mining negative stories to be used against political foes, dubbing himself a “thoughtful, entertaining and persuasive communicator.”

Lyon’s CV details a succession of political consulting gigs and negative campaign triumphs ranging back to the notorious Willie Horton ads used in the George H.W. Bush campaign and the Gennifer Flowers and Whitewater scandals that haunted Bill Clinton.

Lyon also cites his success in pushing negative stories in the media on behalf of Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral campaigns and in a 2001 New Jersey gubernatorial race. In that campaign, Lyon states, he “worked with reporters at the New York Times, the Daily News” and several other newspapers “to develop stories that drove the acting-governor out of the primary.”

The resume also states that Lyon served as a “strategic consultant” on a U.S. Senate campaign in New Jersey in which he worked with reporters to “get stories printed that led the local U.S. Attorney to initiate a federal criminal investigation against the incumbent.”

The reference appears to be to a controversial episode in which Lyon was reportedly involved in the production of a long-form film aimed at taking down New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, a Democrat, in his 2006 race against Thomas Kean, the former chair of the 9/11 Commission.

Lyon’s resume quotes unabashedly from a profile in the New York Times about his role in that race. It describes him as “sought-after, reviled and according to friends and foes alike, good at what he does.”

Campaign finance records show Lyon has worked on behalf of 20 other campaigns including that of Lopez, a former New York Republican state assemblyman, who is now Lyon’s boss at the EPA. Lyon’s consulting firm, Infomentum, did $4,500 worth of web assistance for Lopez’s 2016  congressional campaign for the 19th district in the Catskills, according to campaign finance records. Lopez pulled out of the race, citing family illness.

Reached at his EPA office in lower Manhattan, Lyon declined to comment.

“This needs to go through public affairs, that’s the policy,” he said, referring a reporter to the agency’s press office.

Current and former EPA region 2 staff described the chief of staff’s role as an important one, sometimes determining what information the regional administrator sees, who gets to meet with the top official, and how the agency responds to lobbyists and activists.

Lopez, the regional administrator, sent WNYC a statement noting that Lyon no longer draws a salary from Infomentum. Lopez credited Lyon’s “extensive knowledge of New Jersey and New York issues.” He said Lyon’s work at the EPA has focused on water supply issues in New York City and environmental cleanup efforts at sites in New York and New Jersey.

“Chris Lyon is an enthusiastic contributor to the important work of EPA Region 2,” Lopez said.

Lyon is one of two controversial appointees in the regional office hired since Donald Trump took office, according to EPA records. Also hired in the EPA’s region 2 office is Steve Kopec, whose hiring was announced in an internal email at the same time as Lyon’s. Kopec, a former home improvement contractor and the husband of a former Trump household employee, is now a special assistant to the regional administrator.

Former EPA officials panned Lyon’s political experience as unsuitable for a high-level EPA job.

“A background in partisan politics does little to get the environmental work done at the agency,” said a former senior EPA staff person who declined to be named out of a desire to remain nonpartisan. The regional administrator’s chief of staff “should have a background in environmental policy, and it is especially helpful if they had previously worked on environmental policies in government,” the former senior staffer said.

Indeed, the resume of a former regional chief of staff shared with WNYC includes numerous references to work on environmental advocacy and research.

Environmental activists expressed concerns both about Lyon in particular, and how he fits into the EPA more broadly. “There’s no bottom at the EPA under Scott Pruitt and under Trump,” said Pete Sikora, a senior advisor at New York Communities for Change. “That resume is really stunning to me. This stuff shouldn’t shock me, but it does.”

Part of NYC/45: Tracking the Trump Effect in New York. A team of students at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism investigate the impact of President Trump’s policies on his home state and town.