A US government oversight agency has said White House aide Kellyanne Conway should be fired for engaging in banned political activities while in office. The Office of Special Counsel said Mrs Conway violated the Hatch Act, which bans federal employees from campaigning for candidates while on the job.

The watchdog cited “numerous occasions” in which she violated the law, calling her a “repeat offender”. The White House dismissed the advice as “deeply flawed” and “unprecedented”. The allegations stem from statements Mrs Conway made on television during the 2017 Alabama special Senate election in which she advocated for and against certain individual candidates. The president, vice-president and some other high level officials are not bound by the 1939 Hatch Act. In a statement announcing the recommendation, the independent Office of Special Counsel (OSC) said that her “violations, if left unpunished, would send a message to all federal employees that they need not abide by the Hatch Act’s restrictions.

“Her actions thus erode the principal foundation of our democratic system – the rule of law.” The agency described one episode in which she appears to shrug off the Hatch Act, saying “if you’re trying to silence me through the Hatch Act, it’s not going to work,” and “let me know when the jail sentence starts”.

It is up to President Donald Trump whether or not to heed the recommendation and fire his former 2016 campaign manager. The office is run by Henry Kern, who the president nominated for the role. The White House rushed to defend Mrs Conway, calling the special counsel’s actions a violation of Mrs Conway’s rights to free speech. “Others, of all political views, have objected to the OSC’s unclear and unevenly applied rules which have a chilling effect on free speech for all federal employees,” said deputy White House press secretary Steven Groves in a statement to US media.(BBC)…[+]

WASHINGTON– A U.S. House committee voted yesterday in favour of holding two of President Donald Trump’s closest advisers in contempt of Congress for defying congressional subpoenas related to an effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 U.S. Census.

By a 24-15 bipartisan vote, the House Oversight Committee recommended the full House of Representatives find Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt. For Barr, the top U.S. law enforcement official, it was the second time a House panel had made such a recommendation against him. Trump earlier in the day asserted executive privilege to keep under wraps documents related to his administration’s push to add a citizenship question to the census, defying a subpoena from the committee, chaired by Democrat Elijah Cummings.

“The president’s assertion does not change the fact that the attorney general and the secretary of commerce are sadly in contempt,” Cummings said during a nearly seven-hour meeting of the Democratic-led investigative panel. A Justice Department spokeswoman said in a statement that the committee was playing “political games” and that the agency had tried for months to accommodate the committee’s demands for documents. Ross called the vote an “empty stunt.”(Reuters)…[+]

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) today announced that it will be suing the United States Coast Guard on behalf of four Jamaican fishermen who were held for five weeks in 2017 on suspicion of smuggling marijuana.  The Atlantic reported that according to the lawsuit filed today, the men, Robert Dexter Weir, Patrick Wayne Ferguson, Luther Fian Patterson, and David Roderick Williams went missing after setting out for sea from the village of half Moon Bay.

However, their quest for tuna and snapper was supposed to last about two days. Then they disappeared, the lawsuit said. Five weeks later the men re-emerged in Miami, covered in burns and blisters, according to ACLU. The union alleges that the US Coast Guard officers had snatched them off their boat on suspicion of marijuana smuggling, then held them at sea for more than a month, shuffling them among various vessels en route to the US to face trial. The ACLU claims that Coast Guard officers chained the fishermen up on decks exposed to the elements—even while sailing straight through Hurricane Maria—fed them little, and denied them contact with their loved ones.(Jamaica Observer) …[+]