"Before my bum even hit the chair, the president said, 'No oversight,'" House Oversight Chairman Rep. Jason Chaffetz said. | Getty Chaffetz: No oversight talk in Oval Office meeting with Trump

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House oversight committee, may be probing President Donald Trump's lease of the Old Post Office Hotel, but when the two met at the White House Tuesday, Chaffetz says Trump told him to refrain from talking about any investigations.

"Before my bum even hit the chair, the president said, 'No oversight. You can’t talk about anything that has to do with oversight,'" the Utah Republican told reporters after his 30-minute meeting, which he said was his first time ever in the Oval Office. He said the only other person in the room was Trump's chief of staff, Reince Priebus.


Chaffetz described an inquisitive, "chit-chatty" president, eager to learn about Postal Service reforms, undoing President Barack Obama's move to turn Utah's Bears Ears into a national monument, embassy security and reining in costs associated with the federal workforce. The elephant in the room — Chaffetz's power to investigate Trump and his administration — never came up, he said. Nor, he added, did his ongoing investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server.

Trump has had few one-on-one meetings with lawmakers on his public schedule, and Chaffetz acknowledged he hadn't actually requested the meeting with Trump. The president sat behind his desk, Chaffetz said, as the two spoke, and he regaled the Utahan with stories of his son Donald Jr.'s love of the West. The size of Trump's Election Day win in Utah also came up, Chaffetz added, though it was unclear who initiated the conversation.

"I said, 'yeah, you did well Mr. President,'" Chaffetz recalled.

Chaffetz credited Priebus — an ally since the two traveled together during Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign — with arranging the Oval Office sitdown. Chaffetz said it was an outgrowth of a brief conversation he had with Trump last month in Philadelphia, at the GOP's annual retreat. That meeting, he said, occurred in a hurried and not particularly ideal setting.

"When we talked in Philly ... we agreed that we would be able to spend more time, not behind a stage kind of standing in the dark there with my wife," he said, adding, "Reince followed through on that."

Chaffetz said Trump was supportive of him conducting vigorous oversight during their Philadelphia chat.

"He was the one who said proactively, feel free to investigate anything you want. That’s your job, that’s your role," he said. "He is not going to put a heavy hand in one direction nor the other. We have a job to do and we’re going to do it."