The Daily Beast
Ex-Trump official was eventually punished under the Hatch Act. Who’s next?
Drew Angerer For years, the blatant violations of the Hatch Act were only stopped by Infrastructure Week as the Trump administration’s most grim 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, has resigned from the Hatch Act on several occasions during her tenure as public relations director for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, but has the opportunity to face discipline for violating the law openly, dismissed. and personally, ”Patton wrote in a Facebook post in 2019 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 the Code of Ethics, and accepted a settlement from the U.S. Special Counseling Office that included a $ 1,000 fine and a four-year ban on serving. . in the federal government. Patton also had to admit that she knowingly violated the law when she recruited residents of public housing to appear in a video that Trump campaigned for at the Republican National Convention last year. Normally, such transgressions have been 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 for a whole time of Trump’s term of office without a council quorum. begins with the huge backlog of complaints of the Trump era. Ex-Trump Official Lynne Patton Violation of Hatch Act with Misleading RNC Vids: OSC The Office of Special Counsel would not confirm the existence of pending investigations, but said it was slightly limited by the timing of the complaints submitted to the Merit Systems Protection Board. “In order for OSC 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 Office of Special Counsel, told The Daily Beast said. “Otherwise, MSPB will no longer have jurisdiction.” But the sheer number of existing complaints filed with the council – which is now in the thousands – means that some Trumpworld figures are nervous that they may have consequences for violating the Hatch Act. “Let me put it this way: people are going to wish they had never tweeted,” a person close to the White House texted. Even in a government marked by a sensitive disregard for ethical laws, Lynne Patton stood out, ‘Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the ethical watchdog organization that initially filed the complaint against Patton . ‘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 do. follow. Patton’s actions were by no means an outlier in the Trump administration, where senior officials developed a pattern of violating the Hatch Act for years, 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. in October 2020 alone, CREW found that 16 Trump officials violated the Hatch Act 60 times, including first daughter / senior adviser Ivanka Trump, son-in-law / senior adviser Jared Kushner, press secretary. Kayleigh McEnany, honcho Peter Navarro and communications director Alyssa Farah – but senior government 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,” said the former chief of staff. White House, Mark Meadows – a one-sided sticker for the Hatch Act – told Politico in August, calling concerns about ethical experts ‘very hopeful’. Or, as former White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway said shortly before the Special Counsel’s office decided she should be removed from government service because of her repeated violations of the Hatch Act: ‘Blah, blah, blah … Let know me when the jail sentence begins. Read more at The Daily Beast. Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now! 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