Trump urged to fire Conway for ethics violations
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 Conway 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 J. Kerner, head of the agency. “Her actions erode the principal foundation of our democratic system — the rule of law.”
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 A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, rejecting the 17-page report by Kerner, the special counsel, who was appointed in 2017 by Trump.
"OSC’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 special counsel’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. "No one is above the law."
At issue are Conway’s media appearances attacking Democrats running for their party’s nomination to challenge Trump next year. Among other instances, the report highlighted Conway’s comments on Fox News attacking former Vice President Joe Biden; Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; and former Rep. Beto O’rourke of Texas.
While identified as a White House official and speaking from the White House grounds, she accused Warren of "lying" about her ethnicity, said Sanders’ "ideas are terrible for America" and asserted that Biden had "no vision." On one show, she said she had "yet to see presidential timber" among the Democrats. "I just see a bunch of presidential wood chips."
The report is the second time the office has taken Conway to task, the only time it has ever issued multiple reports to a president on the same individual. In March 2018, the office found two violations of the Hatch Act by Conway when she argued in favor of Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for Senate in a special election in Alabama, with the White House as her backdrop.