On 24 August, Donald Trump’s agriculture secretary, Sonny Perdue, traveled to the battleground state of North Carolina for an official departmental event for food producers hurt by the pandemic. But Perdue’s speech to attendees also featured a campaign pep talk for Trump, who was there too.
At one point Perdue led a chant of “four more years” and called Trump a champion of “forgotten people”.
Perdue’s blurring of the lines between hosting an official Department of Agriculture meeting and a Trump rally, sparked a complaint to the federal Office of Special Counsel by the non-partisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) that charged he violated the Hatch Act, a 1939 law that bars most federal officials from using their government posts to engage in various kinds of political activity.
In a stinging rebuke to Perdue, OSC on 8 October ruled that he had violated the Hatch Act and ordered him to reimburse taxpayers for his travel and other expenses linked to the event.
But Perdue is hardly an isolated example of top Trump officials mixing their work with political activities that critics and watchdog groups say is a worrying breach of laws and regulations designed to stem corruption and keep America’s machinery of state free from political interference.
Reports show that 14 senior Trump political appointees have been cited by OSC for Hatch Act violations, including some repeat offenders. Trump’s ex-political adviser Kellyanne Conway was charged with about two dozen Hatch Act violations according to Crew, which led OSC in 2019 to recommend that she be fired, a message Trump ignored.
“Trump has been openly dismissive of the Hatch Act and didn’t fire Conway when OSC recommended it,” said Donald Sherman, the deputy director of Crew in Washington, which has filed a number of complaints. “This administration has committed Hatch Act violations of a greater scope, scale and frequency than any administration in recent memory.”
By comparison, only two senior Obama administration officials were cited by OSC for violations of the Hatch Act.
Several Trump officials including the housing secretary, Ben Carson, and trade adviser Peter Navarro were cited this year in Crew complaints with OSC for violating the act in their writings and public comments.
Carson penned an op-ed with Trump attacking “the Obama-Biden dystopian vision of building low income housing next to your suburban house” that ran in the Wall Street Journal, and was distributed to housing department employees via its email.
Navarro is alleged to have violated the act for two interviews he gave to Fox News where in his capacity as Trump’s top trade adviser he attacked Biden’s trade record and claimed without evidence that China backs him “because they know he can be bought”.
Crew also filed a complaint against the attorney general, William Barr, alleging he violated the Hatch Act by doing an interview that ran in the Chicago Tribune and aired as a podcast. Barr acknowledged, “I’m not supposed to get into politics,” but warned if “Trump loses this election” we are “going to find ourselves irrevocably committed to the socialist path.”
Separately, two key House Democrats have recently stepped up an investigation into possible Hatch Act violations by the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, involving recent speeches to conservative, religious and political groups in the battleground states of Florida, Texas and Wisconsin.
Pompeo on 3 October spoke remotely to the conservative Florida Family Policy Council, and last month he flew to Texas to address the Prestonwood Baptist church.
Doubts about the propriety of Pompeo’s talks spurred Eliot Engel, who chairs the House foreign affairs committee, and Congressman Joaquín Castro who heads a key subcommittee, to write to two senior state department officials seeking documents about Pompeo’s recent talks, and asking how they relate to “his official duties as America’s lead diplomat”.
The letter noted that his travel and speeches “appear to have been increasing in frequency as the Nov. 3 election approaches”, and were “possibly illegal”.
In a statement, Castro said their investigation into Pompeo’s “use of taxpayer resources for political activity in violation of the Hatch Act is just beginning, and I expect [it] will continue into the next Congress. Not even His Holiness Pope Francis will meet with Secretary Pompeo because he’s politicized our foreign policy as a partisan issue,” referring to the pope’s snub of Pompeo earlier this month when the Vatican declined a meeting with him due to concerns it might be exploited for political ends.
Moreover, after Trump blasted Pompeo for not releasing Hillary Clinton’s emails, Pompeo quickly told Fox News on 9 October he had access to Clinton’s emails and intended to release them soon. “I certainly think there will be more to see before the election.”
Pompeo’s appeasing of Trump prompted Austin Evers, the executive director of the watchdog group American Oversight, to say: “If Mike Pompeo is spinning up the gears of the state department to influence the election, then he and everyone who follows his orders is violating the Hatch Act.” Evers added that: “Pompeo has eviscerated the non-partisan, non-political values that lie at the heart of diplomatic service.”
It is not clear if Pompeo is under scrutiny by OSC.
Other senior officials, including the acting homeland security secretary, Chad Wolf, are facing complaints by Crew for mixing their official posts with Trump’s campaign.
Crew’s complaint cited Wolf’s role in a made-for-TV-style naturalization ceremony with Trump at the White House during the Republican national convention which appeared designed “to support President Trump’s re-election campaign”.
The White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, also drew a Crew complaint for Hatch Act violations for two interviews he gave Fox News on 6 July in which he was identified as chief of staff and advocated for Trump’s re-election and criticized Biden. Meadows has ridiculed the Hatch Act calling it a lot of “hoopla” and claiming “nobody outside the Beltway really cares”.