Psaki Violated Ethics Law With McAuliffe Comments, Watchdog Says
Psaki Violated Ethics Law With McAuliffe Comments, Watchdog Says
(Bloomberg) -- A government watchdog group filed its first complaint against a Biden administration official for violating an ethics law on Friday, alleging that White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki improperly endorsed Democrat Terry McAuliffe for governor of Virginia.
The group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said that Psaki violated the Hatch Act when she said during her regular press briefing on Thursday that “we’re going to do everything we can to help former Governor McAuliffe, and we believe in the agenda he’s representing.”
The Hatch Act limits federal employees’ political activity while working for the government. CREW said in a statement Friday that Psaki’s remark amounted to an endorsement of McAuliffe, who is running against Republican Glenn Youngkin.
Psaki told CNN on Friday that she and Biden take ethics seriously. “As I understand it, if I said ‘he’ instead of ‘we,’ that would not have been an issue at all,” she said. “And I’ll be more careful with my words next time, words certainly matter.”
CREW is well known in Washington for bird-dogging the public statements of federal officials, and the group filed a slew of Hatch Act complaints against aides to former President Donald Trump.
“The last administration systematically co-opted the government for the president’s re-election. While this conduct does not come close to rising to the level of the outrageous offenses of the Trump administration, that does not mean we should be casual about compliance with an important ethics law,” CREW President Noah Bookbinder said in a statement. “The Biden administration should not follow the Trump administration down that path.”
The Office of Special Counsel, which enforces the Hatch Act, officially reported several of Trump’s aides for violations of the law after CREW complaints and recommended that Trump fire one of them, his counselor Kellyanne Conway, for repeat offenses. Trump took no known action against any of them.
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