Rep. David Schweikert admitted to 11 ethics violations and agreed to a $50,000 fine, likely concluding an investigation that began with reporting by the Washington Examiner’s then-own Phil Wegmann.
In October 2017, Wegmann was a writer for the Washington Examiner opinion page, and I was his editor. Former employees of Schweikert, a Republican from Arizona, told Wegmann that the spending by Schweikert’s congressional office and political committees was irregular and that chief of staff Oliver Schwab was at the center of the irregularities.
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Wegmann did the arduous work of combing through the financial records of the congressional office, the campaign, and the Schweikert Victory Committee. He found a lot of money flowing to Schwab, including an $800-a-night reimbursement for a hotel in Phoenix during the Super Bowl. Also, while serving as congressional chief of staff, Schwab was running a consulting firm that was reportedly pocketing six figures from Schweikert’s political committees.
The Office of Congressional Ethics soon began poking around and found more spending that it was interested in. By early 2018, the office was conducting a broader probe into Schweikert’s office.
“There were a couple things that were sloppy,” Schweikert told Wegmann. “There were some things that were absolutely innocent but would’ve been cleaner and more appropriate protocol if you just had used a campaign debit card instead of buying coffee and then getting a reimbursement.”
Well, it doesn’t look that way now. The Arizona Republic reports:
The committee found ‘substantial evidence’ of violations by the five-term Arizona Republican stretching from 2010 into 2018 and faulted him for evasive, stalling tactics that helped him skirt more serious violations.
Schweikert is a conservative congressman. Schwab has a long record in conservative Republican circles. And Wegmann is a conservative guy who, at the time, worked at a conservative opinion page.
But good journalism is done without fear or favor. Where we smell abuse of power, and power is inevitably abused, we are supposed to sniff it out. Wegmann did so. As he dug through dry public records, I called around the Hill. Most of my connections said Schwab and Schweikert were good guys. I’m sure they are. But we weren’t trying to take down bad guys. We were trying to expose misdeeds.
We did that. One result was that Schwab left Capitol Hill. Another is that Schweikert, a conservative Republican, might lose to a Democrat in November.
But a final note on a third fruit from our original investigation: In 2018, Wegmann left the Washington Examiner for RealClearPolitics. When RealClearPolitics hired Wegmann away, my colleague, David Freddoso, whose edits made Wegmann’s first piece much better, responded, “That proves we did our job.”
