The head of the Environmental Protection Agency is reportedly taking drastic steps to make sure no more negative stories are published about his alleged unethical behavior and wasteful spending at the agency. These include tightly monitoring public records requests from journalists and shutting out the majority of EPA employees—even previously trusted political staffers that Pruitt himself had appointed.

Beset by scandal, Pruitt “has grown paranoid and isolated, and he only trusts a small handful of people at the agency,” Axios’ Jonathan Swan reported over the weekend, noting that Pruitt has “walled himself off from all but five EPA political appointees.” This inner circle doesn’t even include his own chief of staff, Ryan Jackson, who “runs the agency’s operations but rarely knows where his boss is.” In fact, most senior EPA officials are no longer told where the administrator is going when he travels. “It’s absolutely unreal working here,” one political appointee told Swan. “Everyone’s miserable. Nobody talks. It’s a dry wall prison.”

Pruitt is trying to stop leaks. But he’s also gone to great lengths to prevent journalists from obtaining public information. Under his leadership, the agency has been extremely slow to fill Freedom of Information Act requests from reporters and environmental groups, which the agency has historically attributed to an unusually large number of requests. But according to a new Politico report, the requests are slow because Pruitt ordered the EPA’s FOIA office to notify political staffers about every request involving him, so that they can review them. Nate Jones, director of the FOIA Project at George Washington University, said the process looks “like the most burdensome review process that I’ve seen documented.”

Unprecedented secrecy has been the norm for Pruitt since he took office. Even before journalists revealed his habit for excessive spending and industry favors, Pruitt’s staffers refused to reveal the bulk of his daily schedule, and Pruitt largely limited his media appearances to friendly sources. But hunkering down won’t shield him from the 11 investigations he’s currently facing.

The former New York City mayor, who recently joined Donald Trump’s legal team, on Friday tried to walk back his reckless media tour after being gently rebuked by the president. Giuliani admitted on Wednesday that Trump had reimbursed personal lawyer Michael Cohen for $130,000 in hush money to Stephanie Clifford, the adult film actress known as Stormy Daniels. But his efforts to unring that bell today fell short. Let’s break down Giuliani’s statement piece by piece.

First: There is no campaign violation. The payment was made to resolve a personal and false allegation in order to protect the President’s family. It would have been done in any event, whether he was a candidate or not.

Giuliani begins by asserting that the Trump campaign didn’t violate campaign-finance laws in paying Clifford, but he doesn’t deny the details that led people to think otherwise. It’s certainly possible that Cohen would have made the payment on Trump’s behalf in any circumstance. But the judicial system would have to weigh that defense against Giuliani’s remarks Thursday on Fox and Friends, which clearly suggested that Clifford, who alleges she had sex with Trump in 2006, was paid a month before the election so as not to hurt Trump’s campaign. (“Imagine if that came out on Oct. 15, 2016, in the middle of the, you know, last debate with Hillary Clinton,” Giuliani said. “Cohen didn’t even ask. Cohen made it go away. He did his job.”)

Second: My references to timing were not describing my understanding of the President’s knowledge, but instead, my understanding of these matters.

Here, Giuliani is claiming that he didn’t have all the facts when he discussed Trump’s sensitive legal affairs on national television. Despite this assertion, he seemed to understand the situation pretty well during his media tour. He told the Washington Post’s Robert Costa how the payments were structured, when Trump knew and didn’t know about them, and that he’d even discussed the matter with Trump in recent days. All in all, that seems to reflect a pretty good understanding the president’s knowledge of these matters.

Third: It is undisputed that the President’s dismissal of former Director Comey—an inferior executive officer—was clearly within his Article II power. Recent revelations about former Director Comey further confirm the wisdom of the President’s decision, which was plainly in the best interests of our nation.

Finally, Giuliani wraps up his clarification with more obfuscation. Nobody disputes that Trump had the power to fire the FBI director. The question was always why he fired Comey. Trump himself has indicated multiple times that the answer is connected to the Russia investigation, and “recent revelations” wouldn’t affect why Trump fired him at the time. The real dispute among legal experts is whether a president can commit obstruction of justice when he uses his constitutional powers. But Giuliani misrepresents that pivotal debate for one that nobody is actually having.

Giuliani was brought on to Trump’s legal team for one crucial purpose: To defend the president on cable news. On Wednesday evening he sat down for a softball interview with Sean Hannity, and he ended up confirming that Donald Trump knew about Michael Cohen’s $130,000 hush-money payment to Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford.

The White House previously had a consistent line on Clifford: If Cohen paid her to sign a non-disclosure agreement about her alleged affair with the president, the president did not know about it. Now Giuliani has confirmed that Trump not only knew about it, but paid Cohen back.

So what was Giuliani thinking? Cohen had previously claimed that he had taken out a home loan to pay Clifford. This was a significant detail: It raised the possibility that Cohen had been reimbursed with campaign money, a violation of federal law.

It’s this claim that Giuliani seemed so intent on debunking, saying, “Paying some Stormy Daniels woman one hundred and thirty thousand is going to turn out to be perfectly legal. That money was not campaign money. Sorry I’m giving you a fact now that you don’t know. It’s not campaign money. No campaign finance violation.”

But that nugget of information also made it clear that Trump had been knowingly misleading the public about his supposed ignorance of the payment. It also is still a likely violation of campaign finance law, since Trump would have had to disclose a loan from Cohen that was used for election-related purposes—namely, to keep Clifford quiet in the run-up to the election.

Trump took to Twitter on Thursday morning to back up Giuliani:

This raises more questions than it answers. While Giuliani seems intent on quashing the campaign finance angle, the payment that was “funneled through” Cohen’s law firm was also shady. We now know that Trump reimbursed Cohen, which had always seemed like the most plausible explanation. But why lie about it? And why pay off someone over something that didn’t happen?

The two aides to the embattled Environmental Protection Agency chief left their posts this week, following two congressional hearings last week where Pruitt was questioned over his ethics scandals and deregulatory agenda. Pruitt is also facing “new reviews” from the EPA’s inspector general over his $50-per-night condo rental from an energy lobbyist, which could constitute a violation of the federal bribery statute.

Pasquale Perrotta, Pruitt’s head of security, resigned on Monday, according to ABC News. Perrotta reportedly encouraged Pruitt’s lavish spending on first-class flights, fancy hotels, and 24-hour security detail—and clashed with EPA employees who disagreed with it, sometimes physically. Perrotta told ABC he plans to “fully cooperate and answer any and all questions” from Congress about his role in spending decisions at EPA, starting with a Wednesday interview with the House Oversight Committee.

Albert Kelly, one of Pruitt’s top aides on cleaning up toxic Superfund sites, has also resigned, according to a Tuesday report from Axios. Kelly—a former banking executive and close friend of Pruitt’s from—decided to resign after The New York Times reported that “he was barred from working in the finance industry because of a banking violation,” Axios reported, citing “two sources with knowledge” of the decision.

The resignations come on the heels of new investigations into Pruitt’s behavior from EPA Inspector General Arthur Elkins. On Friday, the day after the House hearings, two Congressional Democrats released a letter confirming for the first time that Elkins was looking into Pruitt’s potentially corrupt condo deal. There are now at least nine open federal investigations into Pruitt’s activities at the EPA. Still, many congressional Republicans are defending Pruitt, and President Donald Trump hasn’t yet indicated that he intends to fire him.

Time’s Up, a celebrity-powered initiative against sexual harassment in the entertainment industry, has joined a growing campaign against the famous R&B singer.

“The recent court decision against Bill Cosby is one step toward addressing these ills, but it is just a start,” the group wrote in a letter published Monday at The Root. “We call on people everywhere to join with us to insist on a world in which women of all kinds can pursue their dreams free from sexual assault, abuse and predatory behavior. To this end, today we join an existing online campaign called #MuteRKelly.”

The letter noted that R. Kelly “has sold 60 million albums, toured the globe repeatedly and accumulated hundreds of millions of plays on radio and streaming services,” while also being accused of sexual misconduct and crimes.

Multiple lawsuits dating back to the 1990s allege he preyed on underage girls. (At the age of 25, he briefly married then-15-year-old singer Aaliyah Haughton.) He was charged with producing child pornography, but ultimately found not guilty because the jury wasn’t convinced of the identity of the woman in the video. And three women told BuzzFeed last year that Kelly is running an abusive sex “cult” out of his Georgia guest house and Chicago recording studio.

Despite these allegations, Kelly has remained influential over the past 25 years, collaborating with such musical heavyweights as Jay-Z, Lady Gaga and, most recently, Chance the Rapper. Other musicians are coming out against him:

The #MuteRKelly campaign began last year as a petition to ban Kelly’s music from Atlanta radio. Now that it’s gone national, the campaign calls for the musician to be dropped from RCA Records, Ticketmaster, and streaming platforms like Spotify. Last week provided several signs that it’s working: Tom Joyner, the host of a nationally syndicated radio show, has vowed not to play his music; an upcoming Kelly concert in Chicago was cancelled; and his publicist and lawyer resigned from his team.

Lawmakers in the New Hampshire House of Representatives on Thursday overwhelmingly passed a bill, already approved by the state Senate, to replace capital punishment with life-without-parole sentences. New Hampshire has not carried out an execution since 1939 and only one inmate currently sits on the state’s death row.

If signed into law, the bill would extinguish the death penalty in New England. Connecticut Supreme Court abolished it in 2015 and reaffirmed its ruling the following year; capital punishment has been banned in the rest of the region for decades—or, in Maine’s case, for more than a century. The bill now requires the signature of Republican Governor Chris Sununu, who said in February that he would veto an abolition measure if it reached him. (The legislation passed by a veto-proof margin in the Senate, and would need just one more vote in the House.)

“I stand with crime victims, members of the law enforcement community, and advocates for justice in opposing a repeal of the death penalty,” Sununu wrote. “Repealing the death penalty sends us in exactly the wrong direction, and I will veto the bill if it reaches my desk.”

Those assertions elide the death penalty’s realities. There’s some evidence that life-without-parole sentences, which lack the grueling appeals process that follows every death sentence, may be more conducive to healing for victims’ families. At the same time, there’s very little proof to support the common claim that executions deter crime. And the American public is increasingly rejecting capital punishment: Support fell to 55 percent in 2016—the lowest level since the 1960s—while only a smattering of counties actually imposes new death sentences in practice.

A Pennsylvania jury found the comedian guilty on Thursday on three counts of aggravated indecent assault for using drugs to sexually assault Temple University employee Andrea Constand 13 years ago. It’s the first major criminal conviction of a celebrity in the #MeToo era and a moment of vindication for more than 60 women who said Cosby assaulted them over a five-decade period.

Under Pennsylvania law, each of the three counts against Cosby carries a sentence of five to 10 years. It’s unlikely he’ll receive a full 30-year sentence since state law allows the sentences to run concurrently if they’re for the same offense. Cosby, who is 80 years old, may also receive a lower sentence because of his advanced age and lack of previous criminal convictions. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Judge Steven O’Neill denied prosecutors’ request to revoke Cosby’s bail, allowing him to stay at home pending a sentencing hearing to determine his fate.

After sentencing, Cosby’s legal battle will move to the appeals process, where he’ll likely try to challenge some of the more damaging evidence against him. His lawyers unsuccessfully fought to keep prosecutors from using depositions he took as part of a 2005 civil lawsuit filed by Constand. In those depositions, Cosby admitted to plying women with quaaludes in the 1970s, bolstering the accounts of many women who accused him of sexual assault. O’Neill also allowed five other women who said Cosby assaulted them to testify before the jury, allowing prosecutors to establish a pattern of behavior that supported Constand’s account.

Cosby already escaped a reckoning once before. In his first trial, the judge declared a mistrial after the jury deadlocked last June. Jurors offered conflicting accounts of what happened during their deliberations, but indicated at least two of them refused to convict the former entertainer after more than 50 hours of deliberations. This time, a new jury only needed around 13 hours to pass judgment.