Guys we did it, a Trump official is finally getting nailed for a Hatch Act violation!

[Jason]

 

[SuperSpreader]

LAW & ORDER

[Ricofoley]

The entire RNC was on the grounds of the White House lol

[outsida]

Someone has to take the fall. 

[Chairslinger]

Sorry, that is a bad Twitter take. Pretty much everything about it is wrong or misleading.

 

The reason Patton was hit with this punishment is because she agreed to it. In layman's terms, she wasn't convicted, she accepted a plea deal. No one else did(yet?). That's why she is making headlines and others are not.

 

Furthermore, she probably accepted this because it amounts to nothing more than a 1,000 dollar fine. The claim that she is being subjected to "real accountability" is laughable. The four year ban is meaningless. She was an unqualified political Trump appointee who would have never served in Biden's admin anyway.

 

I think the line about "mid-level employee" is misleading. I know mileage may vary on impressions, but to me that suggests she is a non-partisan career bureaucrat, possibly even suggesting she is taking the fall for some Trump appointee who left her holding the bag. This couldn't be further from the truth. She was an unqualified political appointee who DeVos'd her way into HUD and repeatedly boosted for Trump.

 

Here are some are some details about Patton(worth going to the actual article, reading the whole thing, and then reading Baptistes's additional links)......

 

 

Quote

 

During her four year tenure at HUD, Patton served as a model Trump official, always toeing the line. She heavily-focused on owning the libs in her Twitter feed, spent a month living in public housing to see conditions firsthand, and made a guest appearance at the hearing of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, who accused his ex-boss of racism. Mark Meadows, who would go on to serve as Trump’s Chief of Staff, used Patton as a representation of why Trump wasn’t racist. 

 

Of course, she regularly blew off previous accusations of being excessively, illegally political in her behavior. In September 2019, when Twitter users called her out for a possible violation of the Hatch Act  she responded: “What part of I don’t give a shit don’t you understand?”

 

Perhaps that was the right mentality all along. Patton’s ban only lasts as long as President Joe Biden’s current term. That means the door will be open for her to get a job in any future Republican administration. 

 

 

 

Some more about Patton.....

 

 

 

Quote

 

Patton’s powerful role in HUD was widely criticized from the moment Trump appointed her. Patton, like former HUD Secretary Ben Carson, had no experience in housing policy before Trump picked her to lead Region 2, the densely populated region including New York and New Jersey. Prior to working in HUD, where she briefly worked as the secretary’s adviser, Patton was an aide to the Trump family and the former president’s son, Eric Trump. 

 

In 2019, during her brief stay in New York public housing, many residents and co-tenants viewed the stint as a publicity stunt. Patton openly condemned public housing conditions and blamed them entirely on officials in New York City, who were frequent targets of the former president. In reality, experts have said continued cuts to HUD are responsible for the lack of affordable, quality housing in the United States. Trump proposed slashing billions of dollars from HUD’s budget in his 2021 fiscal plan made public last year. 

 

 

 

 

That's not even going into the actual violation she admitted to. Which is a bit convoluted and downright bizarre. If you want the details, read the articles. She exploited her position and the people living in public housing to spread a political message at the RNC, to campaign for Trump, and to advance the exact policies that would hurt those same people she exploited.

 

On top of that, it's worth considering who is supposedly the racists here?

Is it the watchdog group Citizen's for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington that referred the violation? Better known as CREW, the group that took the Trump emoluments case nearly to SCOTUS before it was deemed moot due to Trump leaving office? A quick Google search shows that they tirelessly pursued countless violations from all kinds of Trump appointees during his administration. The top three Google searches, one as recently as Feb. of this year, are against Navarro, Barr, and Kushner, for example.

 

Or maybe the OSC(Office of Special Counsel), that actually got the plea deal from Patton? Though honestly at this point I am a little mixed up on who the bad guy would be. Do we think it more likely that a Trump appointee would be racist and go after Trump's buddy, or that Biden's appointee is racist and would only go after black Trump appointees?

The answer is that Trump's guy is still in charge at OSC, as far as I can tell, but it doesn't seem like he had an agenda. The OSC is the one that investigated and then recommended that Conway be fired two years ago. OSC also detailed many violations leading up to last year's election. As far as I can tell this was just another example of the thing Wade love's so much in the American system; an executive branch agency being charged with policing the executive who is also their boss.

 

It is a fair question who else is being pursued for violations. And if it were revealed she was the only one being pursued, even despite everything else, I would agree that was a problem with selective enforcement. But the previous OSC investigations into Conway took years to wind their way to a 2019 recommendation for termination. Patton agreeing to this deal is likely the only reason we saw it months after Biden took office instead of years. High profile Trump people are likely more inclined to fight for the sake of fighting, so even if there is more in the works for this, it could be a long time before we see anything about it.