Taxpayer-funded harassment settlements...

Senate shields taxpayer-funded harassment settlements from public

Pressure is on the office that handles harassment claims and a top GOP senator to come clean on sexual harassment payouts involving Senate offices.

By ELANA SCHOR

The congressional office that handles sexual harassment complaints, along with a top Republican senator, have refused to divulge information about taxpayer dollars doled out to settle harassment claims — and pressure is mounting on them to come clean.

Congress' Office of Compliance, which oversees payments to resolve sexual harassment claims and other workplace disputes, has given data on the Senate’s taxpayer-funded settlements to Senate Rules Committee Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.). The House has already released the compliance office’s settlement totals for that chamber going back a decade.

But the compliance office has declared that the comparable data for Senate offices “may contain inaccuracies,” rejecting a request from Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) to divulge the numbers. And Shelby, who was given the information in his role as head of the Rules panel, is in talks with his Democratic counterpart on releasing the data as Kaine vows to “start raising hell” to shake it loose.

“It’s not classified, like national security stuff,” Kaine said. “I think I’m as entitled to it as anybody.”

Kaine added that overhauling the Hill’s widely criticized harassment system “depends on members having some awareness of the scope of the problem. So anybody who doesn’t want the information to get out, in my view, is being in the way of trying to fix the problem.”

The lack of disclosure has only raised suspicions about how many sexual harassment settlements the Senate has reached — and which members were involved. Congress is already under scrutiny amid a raft of resignations and retirements in recent weeks triggered by harassment claims.

Shelby’s Democratic counterpart on the Rules panel, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, appears to agree with Kaine. Klobuchar said this week that she asked Shelby to release the harassment numbers, and her staff is working with his to that end.

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) described the efforts to pry loose the chamber’s sexual harassment settlement information as “a work in progress, but I think there’s enough of us committed to transparency that we’ll get there.”

When the compliance office said last month that it has paid more than $17 million in taxpayer-funded settlements of Hill workplace disputes since 1997, that high number “got kind of seared in everybody’s brain,” McCaskill said, even though it covered a broad range of issues and employing offices.

But “that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be transparent, that people shouldn’t know if these things are being settled and for how much,” she added.

The compliance office said it's done it's duty by giving the settlement data to the Senate Rules Committee and House Administration Committee.

“It’s up to the committees to decide whether to release the information," the compliance office's outreach manager, Laura Cech, said by email.

In the House, the Administration panel revealed Tuesday that three sexual harassment claims in that chamber have led to $115,000 in payments between 2008 and 2012. That panel released data on the lone House sexual harassment settlement the compliance office paid between 2013 and 2017 -- an $84,000 agreement traced by POLITICO to Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Texas) — within a day of receiving the information.

It's unclear why the Senate committee did not release its harassment settlement data as quickly as the House did.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), the chairman of the Senate's government affairs committee, said in a brief interview this week that "I’m all for disclosure" of the information.

"I think the best way to solve problems is to shed some sunlight on it," he said.

In justifying its rejection of Kaine's request for transparency, the compliance office wrote that it "does not possess reliable information." The reason, it said, is that current law does not give it powers to investigate harassment complaints or mandate that harassment claims are formally catalogued after victims undergo mandatory counseling.

The compliance office added that it would "not necessarily know about" any harassment settlements paid using lawmakers' personal office budgets, as former Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) has acknowledged doing. Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) also has admitted to using his House Natural Resources Committee budget to pay a claim filed by a former aide alleging she was subjected to a hostile work environment.

But another wrinkle might help account for the Senate's delay in releasing its own data on settlements: House rules require the Administration Committee to approve all harassment claims paid from the compliance office's fund, leaving it with its own data to double-check the office's internal information. The Senate has no such requirement, raising concerns about the reliability of the information, according to a source familiar with the issue.

With 20 senators in both parties signing onto Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand's (D-N.Y.) bid to overhaul the compliance office, however, Republicans and Democrats agreed that it's time to open the chamber's harassment settlement books.

"I think the public needs to know how their money is being spent," Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas), a backer of Gillibrand's bill, told reporters this week. "And there needs to be transparency if we're ever going to get through this ugly time in our society where women are treated as less than equals in the workplace."

The third-ranking Democratic senator, Patty Murray of Washington, said she is "hopeful [for] a positive answer" from the compliance office to Kaine's request for data.

Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), citing his experience as a former attorney general of a state battling some of the nation's highest rates of domestic violence, warned that "you don't want to inadvertently undermine the person who was wronged" by disclosing sensitive information.

But Sullivan, who backs Gillibrand's bill, agreed that the Senate's data should be released in a broad enough format to protect victims' identities.

"I don't know why they're not doing that," he said.