For years, flagrant violations of the Hatch Act were rivaled only by “Infrastructure Week” as the Trump administration’s prettiest joke. But nearly three months after President Donald Trump left office, a former administration official has been formally disciplined for exploiting his position for political purposes, and there could be more way.
Lynne Patton, a former Trump Organization and former event organizer, participated in the Hatch Act on several occasions during her tenure as public liaison director for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, but openly rejected any possibility. of facing discipline for violating the law. .
“I just retweeted this amazing tweet from my Twitter accounts, both professional and personal,” Patton wrote in a 2019 Facebook post after sharing a meme from a conservative account. “It may be a Hatch Act violation. Maybe it won’t be. Either way, I honestly don’t care anymore.”
On Tuesday, however, Patton was finally disciplined for violating the ethics law, accepting an agreement from the U.S. Office of Special Advisers that included a $ 1,000 fine and a four-year ban from serving the federal government. Patton was also required to admit that he had knowingly violated the law when he hired public housing residents to appear in a Trump advocacy video at the Republican National Convention last year.
Typically, these violations were ignored by Trump officials as bureaucratic “oopsies”. But with the election of President Joe Biden, the Office of Special Counsel and the Merit Systems Protection Board — the government agency responsible for resolving cases of possible violations of the Hatch Act, which did not have a quorum of the council during the whole of Trump’s tenure — beginning to spare the vast backlog of Trump-era complaints.
The Office of Special Advocates would not confirm the existence of pending investigations, but said it is slightly restricted by the time of the complaints that were filed with the Merits Systems Protection Board.
“In order for the CSO to file a complaint with the Merit Systems Protection Board, CSOs would have had to file the complaint while the subject was still a federal employee,” Zachary Kurz, a spokeswoman for The Daily Beast, told The Daily Beast. Office of Special Advisers. . “Otherwise, MSPB no longer has jurisdiction.”
But the sheer number of existing complaints filed with the council — now thousands — makes some Trumpworld figures nervous about facing consequences for violating the Hatch Act.
“Let me put it this way: people wish they had never tweeted,” he sent a text message to a person close to the White House.
“Even in an administration marked by a disregard for ethical laws, Lynne Patton stood out,” said Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the ethics oversight organization that initially went file the complaint against Patton. “What made his behavior particularly blatant was that he not only used his position for political purposes, but he misled and exploited public housing residents for political gain, showing little consideration. by the people who were supposed to help and the ethical standards who were supposed to be followers. “
Patton’s actions were far from atypical in the Trump administration, where senior officials developed a pattern of years of violating the Hatch Act, mostly with impunity. Only the Republican National Convention presented a tsunami of possible violations of the law, from former Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf, who organized a naturalization ceremony during the first hour, to the former secretary’s decision. of State Mike Pompeo to head to the RNC from Jerusalem to the place of confinement. night on the White House lawn.
In October 2020 alone, CREW found that 16 Trump officials had violated the Hatch Act an incredible 60 times, including first daughter / senior adviser Ivanka Trump, son-in-law / senior adviser Jared Kushner, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany , Commercial President Peter Navarro, and Communications Director Alyssa Farah, but senior administration officials were openly disrespectful of the law, which prohibits the use of a government position or government resources for political purposes.
“No one outside the Beltway really cares: they expect Donald Trump to promote Republican values and they would expect Barack Obama, when he took office, to do the same for Democrats,” said former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows , a Hatch Act benchmark, told Politico in August, calling ethics experts’ concerns “many hoopla.”
Or, as former senior White House councilor Kellyanne Conway said shortly before the Office of Special Advisers determined she should have been removed from government service for her repeated violations of the Hatch Act: “Blah, blah, blah … Let me know when I’m in jail the sentence begins “.