Carla Sands ran afoul of the law, said an independent federal agency that is also investigating other former Trump officials. It’s now Biden’s mess.
Donald Trump’s ambassador to Denmark, Carla Sands, violated federal law when she urged Americans to donate to her boss’s campaign using her official Twitter account.
She did it again when she tweeted — once more from her official account — an article questioning whether Kamala Harris, the daughter of immigrants, was eligible to be vice president.
And yet again when she tweeted that Joe Biden was using the coronavirus pandemic for politics.
It doesn’t matter that Sands left her job last month. The federal agency that investigates allegations of federal employees using their platform to engage in politics reported to Biden last week that her tweets ran afoul of the 80-year-old Hatch Act.
The Office of Special Counsel is investigating more than a dozen allegations of Hatch Act violations against high-profile Trump appointees even though they left office before Biden was sworn in as president, according to four people familiar with the cases.
That’s put Biden in a bind. He’s eager to move on from the investigations of the previous administration after Trump’s second impeachment trial cast a shadow over the first few weeks of his presidency. But House Democrats and government watchdog groups say it’s important to hold past officials accountable for their actions, arguing it will help prevent similar behavior in the future.
Sands, a former socialite, B-list movie star and chiropractor, unwittingly found herself in the spotlight after Trump started musing about trying to buy Greenland from Denmark. Her repeated retweeting of partisan news stories may have made her among the less discreet figures from the Trump era to be accused of violating the Hatch Act. But there were many others.
Most of them, including former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, who both served as White House advisers, and former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, are accused of promoting Trump on TV or Twitter. Others are accused of engaging in politics during the Republican National Convention and on Election Day when political events were held at the White House.
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The Office of Special Counsel is investigating more than a dozen allegations of Hatch Act violations against high-profile Trump appointees even though they left office before Biden was sworn in as president.
That’s put Biden in a bind.https://t.co/T9aOY7tdGW
— POLITICO (@politico) February 19, 2021
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