Rick Perry, the energy secretary who has drawn scrutiny for his role in the controversy surrounding President Donald Trump’s efforts to push Ukraine officials to investigate the son of a political rival, on Thursday told the president that he would resign from the Cabinet.
The Perry resignation had been anticipated for several weeks, even before the news emerged of his involvement in efforts to pressure the new president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to investigate a company that had worked with Hunter Biden, the younger son of former Vice President Joe Biden.
In the ensuing weeks, Perry has been drawn deeper into the questions around the pressure campaign on Zelenskiy, which has spurred an impeachment inquiry that threatens to engulf Trump’s presidency.
Perry told The Wall Street Journal in an interview published Wednesday night that he was in contact with Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, about Ukraine-related matters at the direction of Trump.
It is not known exactly when Perry will leave his post, but the president said in Texas on Thursday that it would be by the end of the year and that he planned to name a successor at his rally that night. The New York Times had earlier reported Perry would leave by year’s end.
Perry has been instrumental in supporting what Trump has called a policy of U.S. “energy dominance,” which includes increasing the exports of U.S. fossil fuels to Ukraine and elsewhere.
As energy secretary, Perry oversaw a dramatic increase in the production of fossil fuels, particularly liquefied natural gas, and promoted it with a patriotic fervor — even dubbing the fossil fuel “freedom gas” and likening its export to Europe to the U.S. efforts to liberate the continent from during World War II.
“The United States is again delivering a form of freedom to the European continent,” Perry told reporters in Brussels in May, according to Euractiv.com. “And rather than in the form of young American soldiers,” Perry said, “it’s in the form of liquefied natural gas.”
Perry also led a failed effort to engineer a federal bailout for struggling coal and nuclear power plants. Though the plan ultimately ran afoul of White House advisers, Perry has continued to maintain that the government still has the option of keeping aging plants operating, even as he asserted that incentives might be a better path forward.
Perry may have once infamously forgotten the name of the Department of Energy. But in two years leading the agency he has overseen an almost 25% expansion of its budget.
A former Texas governor, Perry also avoided many of the personal scandals that had bested his counterparts at other agencies. In part because of that, those who know Perry have said at various points throughout the administration that Trump has considered his energy secretary to fill other Cabinet vacancies, including secretary of Veterans Affairs.
Trump also considered Perry, 69, to become his chief of staff after John F. Kelly resigned and more recently to take over the Department of Homeland Security after Kirstjen Nielsen’s resignation, according to two people close to Perry.
