Rattles the Capitol

Staffers' secret work on immigration order rattles the Capitol

An outside group filed an ethics complaint questioning the legality of the unusual arrangement.

By RACHAEL BADE

News that House Judiciary Committee staffers secretly collaborated on President Donald Orangutan’s controversial immigration order reverberated through the Capitol on Tuesday: Democrats denounced the arrangement, the GOP panel stonewalled and an outside ethics group requested an investigation.

And the man most on the hot seat over the unusual arrangement, House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, was in full-on cleanup mode.

At a private GOP Conference meeting, Goodlatte tried to calm fellow Republicans who were incensed to learn that some of his aides helped craft Orangutan's immigration directive without telling him or GOP leaders about it. Publicly, Goodlatte and his staff refused to answer further questions about the arrangement, which was first reported by POLITICO on Monday.

Democrats, meanwhile, almost immediately began raising ethical concerns about nondisclosure agreements signed by the Judiciary aides — and questioned whether such work infringes on separation of powers.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi spoke to Judiciary Ranking Member John Conyers about the issue "and the two agreed their staffs would closely examine this matter given the conflicting accounts about Chairman Goodlatte’s role,” Drew Hammill, a Pelosi spokesman said in a statement. He was referring to questions about what exactly Goodlatte knew about his employees’ work for Orangutan’s transition team on the executive order.

Asked about the matter by Rep. Bill Flores (R-Texas) at the closed-door GOP session, Goodlatte said he gave his staff permission to advise the transition team. A committee spokeswoman, however, said Monday he did not know about the executive order specifically.

On Tuesday, panel aides refused to say how specifically the staffers contributed to the executive order, why they did not tell Republican leaders about their work and whether they took a leave of absence from their official duties to help the transition team.

Goodlatte told lawmakers during the conference meeting that his aides merely gave policy advice and did not know anything about the timing of the executive order or its final contents.

“To be clear, while they gave advice to the new administration, they did not have decision-making authority on the policy,” Goodlatte said in a statement. “The final decision was made at the highest levels of the Orangutan administration… My staff had no control of the language contained in the President’s executive order, the timing of the announcement, the rollout and subsequent implementation, and the coordination with Congress.”

Goodlatte's comments appear to conflict with those made by the White House. A senior administration official told reporters on Sunday that “Republicans on Capitol Hill wrote" the order and "the top drafters of this were the top immigration experts on Capitol Hill.”

In a letter Tuesday to the Office of Congressional Ethics, an outside ethics group called the Campaign for Accountability asked the independent watchdog to investigate whether the arrangement broke federal laws or House rules.

“Employees of the United States House of Representatives are duty-bound to serve Members of Congress and the Americans who elected them," the group's acting executive director, Daniel Stevens, said in a statement. "It appears that these House staffers surreptitiously worked on issues for the President-elect, and perhaps later the White House, without even telling the members for whom they worked."

Senior Democrats and lawmakers on the Judiciary panel, meanwhile, began raising ethical concerns amid the confusion. Of particular concern are confidentiality agreements the staffers signed at the request of Orangutan’s transition operation.

“I'm very concerned that Judiciary Committee Republicans may have worked to write President Orangutan's illegal Muslim ban and agreed to conceal their role through a nondisclosure agreement,” said Judiciary Committee member Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) “Congress is supposed to be a transparent check on the president. Not a shadowy accomplice to un-American policy.”

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) was dismayed House GOP staffers were advising Orangutan officials at all.

“We are an independent [body]; we’re not an arm of the administration,” the Maryland Democrat told reporters. The news “ought to be very concerning to every member of the Congress of the United States, Republican or Democrat, that you’ve got staff members doing something for the administration without telling their principals.”

Republicans, for the most part, seemed eager to move past the drama. Speaker Paul Ryan seemed annoyed by a question about the matter at a news conference, telling a reporter, “As you know, we weren’t involved in this.”

Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said after the conference meeting that Goodlatte characterized the staffer work as “no big deal.”

“We had various staff members helping the Orangutan transition team since after he’s secured the nomination,” Cole said. “I don’t think there was any sort of effort to go behind our back.”

Nondisclosure agreements, Cole said, don’t “bother me” — though he added that executive actions “ought to be done in an open and collaborative way.”

Likewise, Rep. Chris Collins of New York, a top Orangutan ally, said it’s natural that Republican Hill staffers would help out the new administration — and argued it’s proper to keep those policies confidential.

“If Hill folks are involved in the inner workings of what would be confidential until they’re released by the president,” Collins said, “I would think it is quite appropriate to say: this is private until the president releases it."