Office of Special Counsel Investigating Mike Pompeo Over RNC Speech, Rushed Release of Hillary Clinton Emails – By Jerry Lambe (Law & Crime) / Oct 26 2020
The Office of Special Counsel (OSC) is investigating U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo after the nation’s top diplomat gave a campaign-style speech during this year’s Republican National Convention (RNC) while on a government-funded diplomatic trip to Jerusalem, two Democratic members of the House said on Monday.
In a joint statement, Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) and Chairwoman of the House Committee on Appropriations Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) said that the OSC was investigating whether Pompeo’s RNC speech in August violated the Hatch Act, a federal law that prevents U.S. government employees from using their position in furtherance of a partisan political campaign.
“As we get closer to both this year’s election and his own inevitable return to electoral politics, Mike Pompeo has grown even more brazen in misusing the State Department and the taxpayer dollars that fund it as vehicles for the Administration’s, and his own, political ambitions,” the lawmakers wrote. “The Department has repeatedly missed Congressional overseers’ deadlines for producing documents on his recent domestic speeches that will help us understand whether they were improper political activities. So we’re grateful to OSC—whom Mr. Pompeo can’t fire as he did the Inspector General—for looking into this matter.”
As previously reported by Law&Crime, a December 2019 memorandum from the State Department Office of the Legal Adviser (OLA) entitled “Rules on Political Activities,” OLA unequivocally concluded that all presidential and political appointees such as Pompeo are prohibited from engaging in “political activity in concert with a partisan candidate, political party, or partisan political group.”
Continue to article: https://lawandcrime.com/awkward/offie-of-special-counsel-investigating-mike-pompeo-over-rnc-speech-rushed-release-of-hillary-clinton-emails/?utm_source=mostpopular
