WASHINGTON (Legal Newsline) - The credibility of the Department of Interior’s ethics office is at stake if it is allowed to continue to dodge questions about employees who have appearances of conflicts of interest based on previous work affiliations, according to a GOP lawmaker.
Arkansas Congressman Bruce Westerman called for an audit in a letter to Interior Department’s Inspector General Mark Greenblatt after the Washington Examiner reported last week that Interior Secretary Deb Haaland's senior counselor, Elizabeth Klein, failed to fully reveal to ethics officials the scope of her deputy director job at the State Energy & Environmental Impact Center (SEEIC), which is funded by billionaire and climate litigation advocate Michael Bloomberg.
The SEEIC has placed lawyers in the offices of Democratic state attorneys general that helped file more than 130 regulatory and legal challenges against Trump-era federal environmental policies.
“I respectfully request that the Office of Inspector General (OIG) audit the DEO [Department Ethics Office],” wrote Westerman in the Jan. 24 letter to IG Greenblatt. “The audit should review the DEO’s programs and operations, particularly, but not limited to, the process through which DOI’s political appointees in the Biden Administration receive ethics guidance, recusal obligations, screening arrangements, and ethics waivers.”
Westerman is not alone in seeking review of Klein's ethics disclosures.
On Jan. 18, Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) and Energy Policy Advocates (EPA) jointly filed a complaint with Greenblatt and Heather Gottry, the Interior Department’s designated agency ethics official, requesting an investigation into potential misrepresentation by Klein with respect to previous client relationships.
“The reason for the ethics laws that exist is so that people will come into the federal government and make decisions based on the merits and the facts of the decisions and not make decisions based on what might potentially benefit their former employers or former clients or other people that they have a covered relationship with including family members,” said Michael Chamberlain, director of PPT. “That's one of the reasons why conflict of interest laws are in place is to prevent that.”
The nonpartisan PPT is a watchdog that monitors compliance in government with an eye on restoring the public’s trust in government officials while EPA focuses on transparency in governmental decisions relating to energy and environmental policy.
“At one time, it appears that [Klein] was recused from working with five states then at another time it appeared to be two and, all the while, there's evidence that there were these agreements with 11 states and other types of agreements with several other states that, from our understanding of things, probably should have been reported,” Chamberlain told Legal Newsline. “We're not certain from the documents that we've been able to see that they were reported to the ethics officials so that they could provide the proper guidance.”
The Department of Interior communications director Melissa Schwartz declined to comment.
“We don't know what their motivation is but it certainly does raise questions and suspicions in people's minds,” Chamberlain said. “We would hope that the inspectors general would be completely objective. That’s their job is to be the oversight internally within the agency. They survive through different administrations. They're expected to make decisions not based upon any political types of considerations and they largely look at things objectively and they pursue that for the benefit of the agency and the benefit of the American public. That's part of what they're put in place to do.”
IG Greenblatt was nominated by former President Donald Trump in 2017 and confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Aug. 1, 2019. Gottry joined the Interior Department in 2018 after having worked as associate counsel to former President Barack Obama and ethics advisor, according to media reports.
“If there is activity within a federal agency that rises to a criminal level, there is the possibility that this type of complaint could be forwarded on to the U.S. Attorney from the District of Columbia but largely within the agency the Inspector General really has a lot of autonomy and a lot of discretion on which cases they pursue,” Chamberlain added.