For years, flagrant violations of the Hatch Act have been rivaled only by “Infrastructure Week,” as the Trump administration’s worst joke. But almost three months after President Donald Trump left office, a former administration official was officially disciplined for exploiting his position for political purposes – and there could be more along the way.
Lynne Patton, a longtime Trump organizer and former event planner, participated in the Hatch Act several times during her tenure as public relations director for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, but openly turned down any chance. to face discipline for breaking the law.
“He just resent this amazing tweet from both my Twitter accounts – professional and personal,” Patton wrote in a 2019 Facebook post after sharing a meme from a conservative account. “It may be a violation of the Hatch Act. It may not be. Anyway, I honestly don’t care anymore. ”
On Tuesday, however, Patton was eventually disciplined for violating the law of ethics, accepting a settlement from the U.S. Office of Special Counsel that included a $ 1,000 fine and a four-year ban from serving in the federal government. Patton was also forced to admit that she knowingly violated the law when she recruited public housing residents to appear in a video supporting Trump at the Republican National Convention last year.
Normally, such violations were rejected by Trump officials as bureaucratic “oopsies.” But with the election of President Joe Biden, the Office of the Special Adviser and the Committee on the Protection of Merit Systems – the government agency tasked with resolving potential violations of the Hatch Act, which ran out of a quorum for the entire term of Trump’s term – are beginning to pass. over the vast number of Trump-era complaints.
The Special Counsel’s Office did not confirm the existence of the pending investigations, but said it was slightly constrained by the timing of the complaints that had been submitted to the Committee on the Protection of Merit Systems.
“For CSOs to file a complaint with the Committee on the Protection of Merit Systems, CSOs would have had to file the complaint while the subject was still a federal employee,” Zachary Kurz, a spokesman for the Special Counsel’s Office, told The Daily Beast. . “Otherwise, the MSPB will no longer have jurisdiction.”
But the sheer number of existing complaints to the board – now in the thousands – means that some Trumpworld figures are nervous that they could face consequences for violating the Hatch Act.
“Let me put it this way: people want to wish they never sent a tweet,” wrote a person close to the White House.
“Even in an administration marked by a painful disregard for ethical laws, Lynne Patton has stood out,” said Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the ethics oversight organization that originally filed the complaint against Patton. “What made her behavior particularly blatant was that she not only used her position for political purposes, but misled and exploited the public for political purposes, showing little respect for the people on the ground. which also had to help them with the rules of ethics you had to follow. ”
Patton’s actions were far from an abnormal situation in the Trump administration, where senior officials have developed a model of years of mostly Hatch Law violations. Only the Republican National Convention presented a tsunami of potential violations of the law, from former Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf, who hosted a naturalization ceremony during the first, to the decision of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to the RNC address from Jerusalem to its place of closure at night on the White House lawn.
In October 2020 alone, CREW found that 16 Trump officials violated the Hatch Act 60 times astonishingly, including first daughter / senior counselor Ivanka Trump, son-in-law / senior counselor Jared Kushner, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, Commissioner Peter Navarro, and communications director Alyssa Farah – but the top officials of the administration were openly disrespectful of the law, which prohibits the use of a government function or government resources for political purposes.
“No one outside the Belt really cares – Donald Trump is expected to promote Republican values and Barack Obama, when in office, is expected to do the same for Democrats,” former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows – a stickler for the Hatch Act – told Politico in August, calling ethics concerns “a lot of hoopla”.
Or, as former White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway said shortly before the Special Adviser’s Office ruled she should have been fired from government for her repeated violations of the Hatch Act: “Blah, blah, blah … Let me know when the prison sentence begins. ”