Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin sought Friday to avert ethics questions about his endorsement of the Lego Batman movie last week, by acknowledging that his comments were a mistake in a letter to the Office of Government Ethics.
The Treasury said in a press release that, while encouraging the audience at a public interview to go see the Lego Batman movie that Mnuchin’s firm produced, Mnuchin’s “responses were made in jest and not intended to be a product endorsement of any movie. We think that’s clear in context.”
In his letter to the ethics office, Mnuchin acknowledged that he used “words that could reasonably have been interpreted to encourage the questioner to see a film with which I was associated. I should not have made that statement.”
Mnuchin’s comments came at the end of an interview hosted by the publication Axios last Friday. After issuing a disclaimer that he wasn’t endorsing a product, he told the audience that they should “send all your kids to ‘Lego Batman.'”
Although Mnuchin delivered the endorsement in a joking manner, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee, didn’t take it as a jest. Wyden requested an ethics probe into Mnuchin’s remarks.
The Trump administration has already had a high-profile flare-up over endorsing specific products, which is prohibited under ethics rules. In February, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway plugged Ivanka Trump’s product line in a television interview, earning a reprimand from the ethics office and criticism from Congress.
