Interior secretary attacks Democrat on Twitter

WASHINGTON — Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke accused a high-ranking House Democrat on Friday of paying “hush money” to cover up excessive drinking and a hostile work environment after the lawmaker wrote an op-ed calling for the secretary to resign.

The statement by Mr. Zinke, a former Republican House member, was an extraordinary breach of the norms that usually govern relationships between senior government officials, particularly a Cabinet secretary and a member of a congressional committee overseeing his department.

The lawmaker, Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva, a Democrat from Arizona, is in line to be chairman of the Natural Resources Committee with the new Congress in January, and has been making a case that Mr. Zinke should resign because of ethics questions surrounding his tenure at the Interior Department.

“It’s hard for him to think straight from the bottom of the bottle,” Mr. Zinke wrote in a statement posted on his official Twitter account. He continued, “He should resign and pay back the taxpayer hush money and the tens of thousands of dollars he forced my department to spend investigating unfounded allegations.”

In response, Mr. Grijalva issued a statement saying, “The American people know who I’m here to serve, and they know in whose interests I’m acting. They don’t know the same about Secretary Zinke.”

Mr. Zinke appeared to be referring to a 2015 agreement between Mr. Grijalva and a former House employee who had accused him of overseeing a hostile work environment and frequently being drunk. The employee had threatened to file a lawsuit and Mr. Grijalva’s office ultimately paid the employee $48,395 in severance.

Mr. Grijalva defended the arrangement when it was reported in 2017, denying the claims in the Arizona Daily Star.

“I do not work while drunk and have never had a hostile workplace environment,” he wrote, challenging reporters to find evidence corroborating the former employee’s claims.

Mr. Grijalva framed the severance package as a means for his committee “to move forward with its operations as quickly as possible and for the former employee to quickly begin seeking new opportunities.”