Rep. Jason Chaffetz has taken some baby steps lately toward policing the Trump White House, chastising Kellyanne Conway for her hawking Ivanka Trump products and questioning the president's security protocols at Mar-a-Lago.

Now some Republicans are urging the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to plow full speed ahead — never mind that it’s a fellow Republican on the receiving end of his scrutiny.


“I made efforts to hold, as a junior member, to hold the Bush administration accountable at a number of junctures where I felt they could’ve been better served if we had pushed hard,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), a former chairman of the oversight panel. “In my third time as a congressman with a new president, I think that’s where we need to be.”

Should Chaffetz take that advice, it would mean setting aside historical precedent under which committee leaders have been deferential to presidents of the same party. That natural partisan inclination has held true under Democratic and Republican administrations.

But those oversight traditions appear to be shifting, if slightly, as Trump's early stumbles — and some seamier questions about his ties to Russia — have caused heartburn on Capitol Hill. Key Senate Republicans on Tuesday ramped up calls for an examination of the scandal swirling around Michael Flynn, the just-ousted Trump national security adviser who made questionable pre-inauguration contacts with Russia’s U.S. ambassador. And a New York Times report late Tuesday suggesting routine contacts between Trump's campaign aides and Russian operatives is sure to ratchet up the pressure further for more investigation.

Chaffetz, for his part, has been reluctant to dip his toe into the Flynn controversy. He referred questions about the scandal to an ongoing Intelligence Committee probe, telling reporters that oversight of the Flynn flap is "taking care of itself."

And late Wednesday, Chaffetz joined House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte to call on the Department of Justice's inspector general to investigate the steady stream of "potentially classified" intelligence community leaks that have thrown the Trump administration into turmoil.

For Chaffetz, it’s a delicate balancing act as he considers how early and often to pursue probes of Trump’s vast but opaque business network and the potential for ethical and legal conflicts. Even before Trump was sworn in, Democrats were calling on Chaffetz to demand documents related to Trump’s financial arrangements, prompting the Utah Republican to counter that he wasn’t interested in taking a series of “fishing trips.” That comment infuriated critics who noted Chaffetz said he had "two years' worth of material already lined up" to investigate Hillary Clinton when it appeared she was on track to win the presidency.

But things have changed since Trump took office. Chaffetz, who criticized his party’s nominee during the 2016 campaign, at one point even revoking his endorsement, agreed with Democrats' call late last week for the Office of Government Ethics to investigate Conway after she urged Fox News viewers to buy Ivanka Trump apparel.

Chaffetz then went further Tuesday when he asked the Trump administration to divulge details of security protocols at the president’s Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, expressing concern over Trump’s decision to hold “sensitive” calls and conversations in a public dining room as he responded to a missile test by North Korea.

Oversight committee leaders have historically treaded lightly when it comes to investigating presidents of the same party.

“Traditionally what you have when there’s unified government is the majority party tends to protect its quarterback. That’s been true for 50 years,” said former Rep. Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican who chaired the oversight committee during George W. Bush’s administration. “If you start going after them, it destroys your legislative agenda.”

Other Republicans on Chaffetz’s panel say they, too, would welcome probes of the new administration — and that Trump and his allies could even benefit from it.

“What I would say is that I think that the notion, particularly as it relates to conflict of interest, financial interest and the importance of 'no gray zone' ... at the presidential level, that it’s important that the committee should straighten out the line regardless of party,” said Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.), a member of the oversight committee. “Whether or not that’s politically possible or sustainable, time will tell, but I think it’s important.”

Chaffetz has insisted he intends to approach oversight of Trump on a case-by-case basis, as issues arise. He inquired last month, for example, about Trump's lease of the Old Post Office Building in Washington, where Trump recently opened his luxury hotel. Trump still holds the lease despite a provision that prohibits elected officials from being party to the lease, and Chaffetz has been talking to the General Services Administration to determine whether that constitutes a violation.

Chaffetz has also spent weeks asserting that Trump is legally unable to have a conflict of interest as president, deflecting pressure from Democrats to review Trump’s potential business conflicts. But his decision last week to join Democrats in rebuking Conway represented a change in posture.

It also answers critics in his district who’ve complained Chaffetz hasn’t been aggressive enough with Trump. Chaffetz’s hometown newspaper, the Salt Lake Tribune, published an op-ed in late November calling on him to “shift from investigating people who no longer hold power to people who do.” And at a town hall last week, an angry crowd broke out into chants of “do your job!”

Chaffetz’s appearance at that event came just hours after he had signed off on a letter with his panel’s ranking member, Rep. Elijah Cummings, arguing that Trump, “as the ultimate disciplinary authority for White House employees, has an inherent conflict of interest since Conway’s statements relate to his daughter’s private business.”

Rather than wait for a joint press release with Democrats to issue his letter, Chaffetz instead blasted it out on Twitter: “What she did was wrong, wrong, wrong. Here is our bi-partisan letter to the White House and OGE,” he wrote, including a special hashtag: #Donteverdothis.

On Tuesday, OGE agreed that Conway committed a “clear violation” of ethics rules and requested that the White House address the issue by Feb. 28.

Sanford agreed that oversight committees have “at times been too deferential to the party of alignment,” and he said he hoped to see a more neutral approach to oversight going forward.

“It’s gone beyond gray zone to, at times, bizarre zone,” said the South Carolina Republican. “The whole notion that the president of the United States is going to be condemning Nordstrom’s for buying and product line decisions is not exactly the typical role we’ve seen from presidents of the past.”

