AGENCY CLAIMS Trump aide violates Hatch Act.

WASHINGTON — An independent government agency recommended Thursday that President Donald Trump fire Kellyanne Conway, his White House counselor, for repeated violations of an ethics law barring partisan politics from the federal workplace.

In a letter accompanying a report to Trump, the agency called Conway a “repeat offender” of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in campaign politics at work, saying that her flagrant defiance of the law justified her dismissal from the White House.

“As a highly visible member of the administration, Ms. Conway’s violations, if left unpunished, send a message to all federal employees that they need not abide by the Hatch Act’s restrictions,” said the letter to the president, signed by Henry Kerner, head of the agency.

The agency, called the Office of Special Counsel, enforces the Hatch Act, and is not related to Robert Mueller, the former special counsel who investigated Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Despite its official mission, the office has no power to force Conway’s dismissal, and the White House quickly made clear that Trump would not follow its suggestion.

Conway had no immediate reaction, but she has previously scorned the office as irrelevant. “Blah, blah, blah,” she told a reporter who noted her past Hatch Act violations a couple of weeks ago. “If you’re trying to silence me through the Hatch Act, it’s not going to work. Let me know when the jail sentence starts.”

The White House on Thursday released an 11-page memo from Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, rejecting the 17-page report by Kerner, who was appointed in 2017 by Trump.

“[The Office of Special Counsel’s] draft report is based on multiple fundamental legal and factual errors, makes unfair and unsupported claims against a close adviser to the president, is the product of a blatantly unfair process that ignored statutory notice requirements, and has been influenced by various inappropriate considerations,” Cipollone wrote.

Among other things, he argued that the office was applying an overreaching interpretation of the law to target the president’s aide, particularly by applying unjustified standards to social media.

“[The office’s] overbroad and unsupported interpretation of the Hatch Act risks violating Ms. Conway’s First Amendment rights and chills the free speech of all government employees,” Cipollone wrote. The call for Conway’s firing, he added, “is as outrageous as it is unprecedented.”

Outside ethics watchdog groups praised the office’s report and criticized Conway for disregarding the law. “It’s untenable for a senior counselor to the president to decide that civil law is no longer something she is bound by,” said Liz Hempowicz, director of public policy at the Project on Government Oversight, one of the groups.

The House Oversight and Reform Committee’s Democratic leadership announced that it will hold a hearing on Conway’s actions on June 26 and invite her to testify.

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