Schumer: GOP 'filling the swamp' with ethics officer subpoena threat

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer criticized House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz for threatening to subpoena the head of the independent Office of Government Ethics over the official's statements about Donald Trump.

The threat, Schumer said, is evidence that Republicans are “filling the swamp instead of draining it.”


Schumer was joined by Rep. Elijah Cummings (D.-Md.), the House Oversight Committee’s ranking member, who said in a Friday morning statement that Chaffetz should steer the committee away from “acting as a cheerleader for Donald Trump and attacking or intimidating his critics.”

White House press secretary Josh Earnest, too, piled on at Friday's daily hews briefing, describing the move as "the completion of the Congressional Republican swamp-filling hat trick."

Chaffetz threatened to subpoena OGE director Walter Shaub during an interview Thursday, attacking him for criticizing President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to address the potential conflicts of interest between his incoming administration and his massive business empire. Shaub said Trump’s plan, which the president-elect’s team explained at a news conference on Wednesday, is “meaningless.”

“He seems to be acting prematurely at best, without doing investigations or thorough looks,” Chaffetz said of Shaub. The Utah Republican said the OGE head has thus far refused to schedule a meeting to discuss his office’s public comments about Trump, but that one way or another, such a meeting will occur. “He is coming in. This is not going to be an optional exercise,” Chaffetz said.

“The Republicans are at it again, filling the swamp instead of draining it. First, House Republicans tried to gut the Office of Congressional Ethics. Now they're trying to handcuff the Office of Government Ethics. Mr. Chaffetz's attempt to bully Mr. Shaub out of doing his job are absolutely despicable,” Schumer said in his statement, released Friday morning.

Schumer praised Shaub for working “diligently and in a nonpartisan way” under presidents from both parties to ensure that government employees are working free from conflicts of interest. The New York senator wrote that “few have tried to drain the swamp more than Mr. Shaub, and he did it equally well under Democratic and Republican administrations.”

Chaffetz’s subpoena threat comes less than two weeks after public outcry, and a tweet from Trump, forced Republicans to back away from their plan to restructure and dramatically weaken the Office of Congressional Ethics. The Utah Republican said that proposal “was definitely not in our jurisdiction,” referring to the House Oversight Committee, and that his interest in Shaub is based on the OGE head’s public criticism of Trump without having first combed through the details of the president-elect’s plan.

“We want to get ethics right. We need a fair person behind the plate that’s going to call balls and strikes,” Chaffetz said. “What they’re supposed to do is help work with somebody to comply with the ethics requirements, but when you talk publicly about private conversations, that’s not ethical.”

Also of concern to Chaffetz was a bizarre series of posts to the OGE’s Twitter account in late November praising Trump for his “total divestiture” from his businesses, something the president-elect had not announced he would do and per his Wednesday news conference, does not intend to do moving forward. Mimicking Trump’s staccato style on Twitter, the OGE account featured a series of posts including “[email protected] OGE is delighted that you've decided to divest your businesses. Right decision!” and “[email protected] Brilliant! Divestiture is good for you, very good for America!”

“It was not clear whether these tweets constituted official OGE guidance or something less formal. It is clear, however, the tweets publicized private discussions with the president-elect’s counsel," Chaffetz wrote in a Thursday letter to Shaub. “The tweets also created the appearance that OGE approved the president-elect’s divestiture plan, which caused further confusion.”

The Friday morning statement from Cummings followed a letter Thursday night to Chaffetz, calling for a hearing on Trump’s conflict of interest arrangement at which Shaub would testify. Chaffetz has called for only a transcribed interview with Oversight Committee staff members, but a public hearing, Cummings wrote, would protect the committee from criticism of the type that Schumer launched Friday morning.

“I believe it is imperative that Director Schaub be permitted to testify in public — before the American people — to avoid any perception that he is being unfairly targeted behind closed doors for expressing his views,” Cummings wrote. “Protecting those who speak truth to power is one of this Committee’s core values and purposes, and we should fully support government officials charged with increasing transparency and ethical governance when they provide independent advice that is based on the law.”

Darren Samuelsohn and Josh Gerstein contributed to this report.