Politico is reporting that former HUD regional administrator Lynne Patton has been fined $1000 and barred from serving in federal office for four years for using government resources to produce a rather bizarre video for the 2020 Republican National Convention, in which New York public housing residents were unknowingly used to fluff the then-president’s policies. The punishment was the result of a complaint brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).
Patton, whose qualifications to administer the New York/New Jersey region for HUD included planning Eric Trump’s wedding and helping run the younger Trump’s foundation to siphon charity money for cancer kids to his father's coffers, had already run afoul of the Hatch Act.
She had tangled with Hatch Act complaints before. The same Office of Special Counsel reprimanded her in 2019 for using her official government Twitter account to promote political tweets and displaying a red “USA” hat sold by the Trump campaign in her office.
Earlier in 2019 she had posted to Facebook that she “honestly [didn’t] care anymore” whether she was violating the Hatch Act with her tweets.
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Ms. Patton may have gotten off relatively lightly in the matter of the RNC video violation, but it’s still satisfying to see even a modicum of comeuppance visiting members of the last administration, and it whets the appetite for more.