White House press secretary Josh Earnest tore into House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz on Friday after the Utah Republican threatened to investigate the federal government’s top ethics official this week.
Chaffetz accused Walter Shaub Jr., director of the Office of Government Ethics, in a letter on Thursday of “blurring the lines between public relations and official ethics guidance.” He cited a series of tweets posted by the OGE in November and comments the federal ethics watchdog made in May about the Clinton Foundation, and asked that Shaub sit down with Oversight Committee staffers “as soon as possible” to explain his actions.
Earnest lambasted Chaffetz in a rant to reporters, suggesting that he is “threatening to shut down the office of the guy who is doing the job that Jason Chaffetz himself is refusing to do.”
“The Republican chairman of the House Government Oversight Committee — the individual who as much as anyone else in the United States Congress is charged with providing oversight of the executive branch — is now seeking to intimidate a senior executive branch official who is responsible for enforcing ethics rules,” Earnest said. “It’s outrageous and … only the latest installment in the embarrassing series of episodes that have characterized Jason Chaffetz’s tenure as chairman of that committee.”
“You’ll recall this is the guy that was charged with investigating government employees who were using personal email for government purposes at the same time he’s handing out his government business card with his personal email address on it,” he said.
In addition to describing his tenure as “embarrassing,” Earnest said Chaffetz’s actions run “contradictory to the preferences of the millions of Americans who showed up at the polls on Election Day and voted for the guy who was vowing to drain the swamp.”
The administration’s criticism comes one day after Richard Painter, a former ethics lawyer for the Bush administration, accused Chaffetz of “strong-arming” the OGE. “They are obviously very upset the Office of Government Ethics is leaning on Trump and not willing to jam through his nominees,” Painter had told the New York Times. “It is political retaliation,” he claimed.
Chaffetz’s office did not return the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
