For years, blatant violations of the Hatch Act have been thwarted only by Infrastructure Week as the Trump administration’s most grim running joke. But almost three months after President Donald Trump left office, a former administration official has been formally disciplined to use their position for political purposes – and more may be on the way.
Lynne Patton, a longtime Trump organization and former event planner, repeatedly insulted Hatch Act during her tenure as Public Liaison Director of the Department of Housing and Urban Development at the Hatch Act, but openly to every opportunity to face discipline. dismissed for violating the law. .
“Customize this amazing tweet from both my Twitter accounts – professionally and personally,” Patton wrote in a 2019 Facebook post after sharing a meme from a Conservative account. ‘It could be a Hatch Act violation. It may not be. Either way, I honestly don’t care anymore. ”
On Tuesday, however, Patton was finally disciplined for violating ethical legislation, and he accepted a settlement by the U.S. Bureau of Special Councils that includes a $ 1,000 fine and a four-year ban on the federal government. Patton also had to admit that he violated legislation when he recruited residents of public housing to appear in a video advocating Trump at the Republican National Convention last year.
Normally, such transgressions are shaken off by Trump officials as bureaucratic ‘options’. But with the election of President Joe Biden, the Office of Special Counsel and the Merit Systems Protection Board – the government agency tasked with assessing cases of possible violations of the Hatch Act, which is for an entire period of Trump’s term without a council quorum. begins with the huge backlog of complaints from the Trump era.
The Office of Special Counsel did not confirm the existence of pending investigations, but said it was slightly limited by the timing of complaints lodged with the Merit Systems Protection Board.
“To lodge a complaint with the Merit Systems Protection Board, OSC would have to file the complaint while the subject was still a federal employee,” Zachary Kurz, a spokeswoman for the special counsel’s office, told The Daily Beast said. . “Otherwise, MSPB will no longer have jurisdiction.”
But the sheer number of existing complaints filed with the board – which now numbers in the thousands – means some Trumpworld figures are nervous that they could have consequences for violating the Hatch Act.
“Let me put it this way: people are going to wish they had never tweeted,” one person close to the White House texted.
“Even in an administration marked by a serious disregard for ethical laws, Lynne Patton stood out,” said Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the ethical watchdog organization that initially filed the lawsuit against Patton. submitted. ‘What made her behavior particularly special was that she not only used her position for political purposes, but that she deceived and exploited residents of public housing for political gain, and that they paid little attention to the people she had to help and the ethical rules she had to follow. ”
Patton’s actions were far from an outlier in the Trump administration, where senior officials developed a years-long pattern of violating the Hatch Act, mostly with impunity. The Republican National Convention alone has offered a tsunami of possible violations of the law, from former acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf, who hosted a naturalization ceremony for the first time, to the decision of the former secretary of state foreign affairs Mike Pompeo to address the RNC from Jerusalem to the place where it will be closed. night on the White House lawn.
In October 2020 alone, CREW found that 16 Trump officials had surprisingly violated the Hatch Act 60 times, including first daughter / senior adviser Ivanka Trump, son-in-law / senior adviser Jared Kushner, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, commercial judge Peter Navarro, and communications director Alyssa Farah – but senior administration officials were openly disrespectful to the law, which bans the use of a government position or government resources for political purposes.
“Nobody outside the Beltway really cares – they expect Donald Trump to promote Republican values and they would expect Barack Obama, when he was in office, to do the same for the Democrats,” the former White House chief of staff said. Mark Meadows – a one-time sticker for the Hatch Act – told Politico in August, calling the concerns of ethics experts ‘very hopeful’.
Or, as former White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway said shortly before the special council’s office decided she needed to be removed from government services because of her repeated violations of the Hatch Act: ‘Blah, blah, blah .. Let me know when the jail sentence begins. ”