A former Trump administration official is facing a fine and a temporary ban from federal employment after she was found to have violated the Hatch Act in producing a video for the 2020 Republican National Convention.
Lynne Patton, who served as Region II administrator for the Housing and Urban Development Department starting in 2017, will not be employable by the federal government for the next four years and will have to pay a $1,000 fine, Office of Special Counsel announced on Tuesday.
“As a HUD employee, Patton received permission in early 2019 to temporarily live in and observe living conditions in the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA),” OSC said in a statement. “During her approximately one-month stay, Patton met residents and later leveraged one of these relationships to recruit participants to film a video that would air at the [Republican National Convention].”
BIDEN HUD SECRETARY MAY HAVE VIOLATED HATCH ACT DURING WHITE HOUSE PRESS BRIEFING
Some of the people who appeared in the video told the New York Times that their interviews were deceptively presented to display them as supportive of the Trump administration.
“By using information and NYCHA connections available to her solely by virtue of her HUD position, Patton improperly harnessed the authority of her federal position to assist the Trump campaign in violation of the Hatch Act,” OSC said.
Members of the executive branch, under the Hatch Act, are restricted from engaging in partisan political activity while acting in their professional capacity. Only the president and vice president are exempted.
“No length of punishment will ever be able to outlast the permanent positive trajectory upon which NYCHA is now advancing thanks to the Trump Administration and my amazing HUD team,” Patton told the Washington Post on Tuesday.
Patton previously was contacted by the Office of Special Counsel for a Hatch Act-related matter following a post to Facebook in May 2019 in which she shared a screenshot of a tweet in defense of then-HUD Secretary Ben Carson.
“Just retweeted this amazing tweet from both of my Twitter accounts – professional and personal,” she said. “It may be a Hatch Act violation. It may not be. Either way, I honestly don’t care anymore.”
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Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal watchdog group, filed a complaint against Patton for the video.
“Even in an administration marked by a callous disregard for ethics laws, Lynne Patton stood out,” Noah Bookbinder, the president of the group, said in a statement released on Tuesday. “What made her behavior particularly egregious was that she not only used her position for political purposes, she misled and exploited public housing residents for political gain, showing little regard for the people she was supposed to be helping and the ethics rules she was supposed to be following.”
