(September 6, 2024 at 1:09 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote:Quote:Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro violated a law limiting certain political activity of federal employees when he appeared to endorse President Biden for reelection and criticize former President Trump in January, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) announced on Thursday.
The OSC, an independent investigative federal agency, said in a report sent to Biden that Del Toro violated the Hatch Act — a law prohibiting political activity while a federal employee is on duty, in the federal workplace, or acting in an official capacity — when he suggested the American people should go vote for Biden at a January event in the U.K.
[...]
He added, “we cannot afford to have a president who aligns himself with autocratic dictators and rulers whose interpretation of democratic principles is suspicious [at] best.”
“I’m confident that the American people will step up to the plate come November and support President Biden for a second term as our commander in chief,” he said.
Special counsel Hampton Dellinger said in a statement that Del Toro was “speaking in his official capacity on a taxpayer-funded trip” when he “encouraged electoral support for one candidate over another in the upcoming presidential election.”
“By doing so, he crossed a legal line and violated the Hatch Act. This is especially troubling because Secretary Del Toro has himself acknowledged that military work and partisan politics should not be mixed,” Dellinger said.
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/48655...hatch-act/
As much as I agree with the SecNav, what he did was wrong.
And yet there has not been - as far as I’m aware - a special counsel appointed to address Trump’s Arlington fiasco.
Boru
‘I can’t be having with this.’ - Esmeralda Weatherwax
