WASHINGTON — Earlier this week, White House chief of staff Ron Klain was found to be in violation of federal law for using his government Twitter account to promote Democratic candidates for elected office.
In a Wednesday letter, the Office of Special Counsel (not to be confused with the office of special counsel Robert Mueller, tasked in 2017 with investigating electoral interference) wrote that it had “decided not to pursue disciplinary action and instead issued him a warning letter.”
By then, Klain had already deleted the offending message, a retweet of a Democratic group called Strike PAC.
The White House quickly apologized. “We are not perfect, but our violations have been few,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Thursday. She was referring to violations of the Hatch Act, a 1939 law that prohibits federal officials from engaging in political activities. Only the president and vice president are exempt from its limitations.
And that was that. Klain faces no disciplinary action from a president who he has closely advised for many years. At a time of nuclear fears and economic anxieties, the episode was little more than a blip on the crowded political radar, a reminder that Klain may, like the rest of us, need a break from social media.
But for some in Washington, Klain’s ethical transgression provided a useful contrast to how the Trump administration handled such situations — of which there were many during Donald Trump’s four years in the White House. That the complaint against Klain was filed by Stephen Miller, a top adviser to Trump who had run afoul of the same Hatch Act rules, added a note of irony.
“I recall in the White House when we would get Hatch Act violations, that was a badge of honor. It was a joke in the White House,” Trump’s former communications director Stephanie Grisham said last year.
Never was the Trump administration’s cavalier attitude towards government ethics more apparent than on May 29, 2019.
That day, Kellyanne Conway strode to a bank of microphones on a strip of pavement outside the White House known as “Pebble Beach.” Senior administration officials routinely give interviews there, but rarely of the kind Conway gave that day.
The Democratic primary for the 2020 presidential nomination was underway, and Conway — a longtime Republican operative who had been a senior adviser to President Trump since the start of his term — was unimpressed. She denounced the Obama administration for its foreign and domestic policy, and singled out Vice President Joe Biden for his own alleged shortcomings.
“We inherited a mess from the last administration, of which he was a major part,” Conway told reporters.
Biden, however, was no longer merely the former vice president or a three-decade veteran of the Senate. A month before, he had announced that he was running for the White House. By denouncing Biden from the White House grounds, Conway seemed to be violating the Hatch Act, which she had already done several times before.
Yet when she was confronted by a reporter about the potential transgression, Conway defiantly dismissed the concern. “If you’re trying to silence me through the Hatch Act, it’s not going to work. Let me know when the jail sentence starts,” she said.
It was an exchange typical of how Conway and other top Trump administration officials often conflated the business of government with naked political concerns, said government ethics officials at the time.
Plenty of officials in previous Democratic and Republican administrations had violated the Hatch Act; with Trump, the difference was a matter of scale. Supporters of the former…
Read More: White House apology over ethics violation shows shift in tone from Trump