Extract from The Guardian
When
Jason Chaffetz called Kellyanne Conway’s hawking of Ivanka Trump’s
clothing line on television “absolutely wrong, wrong, wrong” and
“clearly over the line”, it was supposed to be a reassuring sign. It
wasn’t.
Conway’s insistence in a Thursday morning interview on Fox News that people should “go buy Ivanka’s stuff” was certainly a curious assertion coming from a top White House adviser, and, according to legal experts, may well have have violated a federal ethics rule against promoting an associate’s monetary interests.
Yet you won’t find any interest on the Republican House oversight committee in investigating the matter.
As the committee’s chairman, Chaffetz has long resisted calls from Democrats to investigate any number of Trump’s potential business conflicts of interest. But he didn’t hesitate to, for instance, spearhead early investigations into Clinton’s role in the Benghazi attack. The upshot of what would become a multi-year, $7.8m investigation explored by eight different, mostly Republican-led panels was summarized in a conclusive 800-page Benghazi report last summer that found Clinton guilty of no wrongdoing.
Now faced with a violation that appears to be much more blatant than anything he investigated with regard to Clinton, Chaffetz has managed only to wag a finger and suggest someone else look into it.
Working in concert with the oversight committee’s ranking Democrat, Elijah E Cummings, Chaffetz co-authored a letter to the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) calling Trump’s strategist’s comments “unacceptable” and asking that the agency recommend some measure of discipline given the “inherent conflict of interest”.
Don’t be fooled and think that constitutes Republicans taking action. It’s merely lip service.
The OGE, whose website was down for hours following the release of Chaffetz’s letter due to a surge in traffic, tellingly sought to correct any misconceptions regarding its powers (or lack thereof) in a series of tweets. As an agency spokesman emphasized Thursday, although it works to prevent potential ethics violations from occurring, “OGE does not have investigative or enforcement authority”.
Chaffetz’s committee does. But it won’t do any such investigating as long as Republicans are in charge. That would make sense morally, but it wouldn’t be politically expedient.
And it’s not just Chaffetz saying one thing but doing another.
Peter Schweizer, author of Clinton Cash, the bestselling investigation that helped popularize criticism of the Clinton Foundation, had some similarly tough talk for Conway. “They’ve crossed a very, very important, bright line, and it’s not good,” he said, adding: “To encourage Americans to buy goods from companies owned by the first family is totally out of bounds and needs to stop.”
While he prides himself on investigating ethical questions in politics, he won’t be writing a book on the ethics of Trump’s business interests any time soon. Which is to say, he’s pulling a Chaffetz. What’s worse, Schweizer, the man handing down wisdom on Trump and Clinton’s potential conflicts of interest, has worked closely with Trump chief strategist Stephen K Bannon.
None of this is improved by the fact that exhaustive investigations into the Clinton Foundation, whose real charitable benefits are undisputed, has – this might sound familiar – found no clear evidence of wrongdoing. Nevertheless, the Clinton Global Initiative has announced the shuttering of its main office.
That time and time again there has been no clear upshot to the long list of Republican-led investigations against Clinton but to politically tar her, is an established pattern. Chief among them, of course, is the never-ending saga around her emails, something Chaffetz has vowed to keep investigating into this year.
Never mind that exhaustive investigation of the matter has found nothing approaching a smoking gun and, anyway, it has no bearing on anything of relevance now.
And in his finger-wag routine, Schweizer, for his part, seemed to almost channel Trump’s interests. “Clearly, the Trumps feel some of this is related to politics,” he said sympathetically. “But whether that’s true or not, these marketing battles need to be fought by Ivanka and her company.”
At a glance it might seem as if such rebukes, empty as they are, are better than nothing: they aren’t.
In making noise but doing nothing, Schweizer and Chaffetz and even the president’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, who said Conway had been “counseled” but refused elaborate at all on what that entailed, are all doing the same thing. They’re doing the minimal amount in hopes the public will forget, as quickly as possible, about what has every appearance of being a gross abuse of the power of political office.
Conway’s insistence in a Thursday morning interview on Fox News that people should “go buy Ivanka’s stuff” was certainly a curious assertion coming from a top White House adviser, and, according to legal experts, may well have have violated a federal ethics rule against promoting an associate’s monetary interests.
Yet you won’t find any interest on the Republican House oversight committee in investigating the matter.
As the committee’s chairman, Chaffetz has long resisted calls from Democrats to investigate any number of Trump’s potential business conflicts of interest. But he didn’t hesitate to, for instance, spearhead early investigations into Clinton’s role in the Benghazi attack. The upshot of what would become a multi-year, $7.8m investigation explored by eight different, mostly Republican-led panels was summarized in a conclusive 800-page Benghazi report last summer that found Clinton guilty of no wrongdoing.
Now faced with a violation that appears to be much more blatant than anything he investigated with regard to Clinton, Chaffetz has managed only to wag a finger and suggest someone else look into it.
Working in concert with the oversight committee’s ranking Democrat, Elijah E Cummings, Chaffetz co-authored a letter to the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) calling Trump’s strategist’s comments “unacceptable” and asking that the agency recommend some measure of discipline given the “inherent conflict of interest”.
Don’t be fooled and think that constitutes Republicans taking action. It’s merely lip service.
The OGE, whose website was down for hours following the release of Chaffetz’s letter due to a surge in traffic, tellingly sought to correct any misconceptions regarding its powers (or lack thereof) in a series of tweets. As an agency spokesman emphasized Thursday, although it works to prevent potential ethics violations from occurring, “OGE does not have investigative or enforcement authority”.
Chaffetz’s committee does. But it won’t do any such investigating as long as Republicans are in charge. That would make sense morally, but it wouldn’t be politically expedient.
And it’s not just Chaffetz saying one thing but doing another.
Peter Schweizer, author of Clinton Cash, the bestselling investigation that helped popularize criticism of the Clinton Foundation, had some similarly tough talk for Conway. “They’ve crossed a very, very important, bright line, and it’s not good,” he said, adding: “To encourage Americans to buy goods from companies owned by the first family is totally out of bounds and needs to stop.”
While he prides himself on investigating ethical questions in politics, he won’t be writing a book on the ethics of Trump’s business interests any time soon. Which is to say, he’s pulling a Chaffetz. What’s worse, Schweizer, the man handing down wisdom on Trump and Clinton’s potential conflicts of interest, has worked closely with Trump chief strategist Stephen K Bannon.
None of this is improved by the fact that exhaustive investigations into the Clinton Foundation, whose real charitable benefits are undisputed, has – this might sound familiar – found no clear evidence of wrongdoing. Nevertheless, the Clinton Global Initiative has announced the shuttering of its main office.
That time and time again there has been no clear upshot to the long list of Republican-led investigations against Clinton but to politically tar her, is an established pattern. Chief among them, of course, is the never-ending saga around her emails, something Chaffetz has vowed to keep investigating into this year.
Never mind that exhaustive investigation of the matter has found nothing approaching a smoking gun and, anyway, it has no bearing on anything of relevance now.
And in his finger-wag routine, Schweizer, for his part, seemed to almost channel Trump’s interests. “Clearly, the Trumps feel some of this is related to politics,” he said sympathetically. “But whether that’s true or not, these marketing battles need to be fought by Ivanka and her company.”
At a glance it might seem as if such rebukes, empty as they are, are better than nothing: they aren’t.
In making noise but doing nothing, Schweizer and Chaffetz and even the president’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, who said Conway had been “counseled” but refused elaborate at all on what that entailed, are all doing the same thing. They’re doing the minimal amount in hopes the public will forget, as quickly as possible, about what has every appearance of being a gross abuse of the power of political office.
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