At the final night of the Republican National Convention, a two-minute clip aired attacking Bill de Blasio’s housing policy. Watch it here.
The video featured four tenants at the Frederick Douglass Houses, a New York Housing Authority project. But according to at least three of the tenants, they were never told they were going to appear in a video intended to be seen at the convention. And they aren’t happy about it.
“I am not a Trump supporter,” said one of the tenants, Claudia Perez. “I am not a supporter of his racist policies on immigration. I am a first-generation Honduran. It was my people he was sending back.”
The public housing clip was the second instance of the Trump campaign’s misleading participants in an event involving the federal government that was filmed for the Republican National Convention. On Tuesday, the convention showed a video of five new American citizens being sworn in at a naturalization ceremony by Mr. Trump. Some of the five said they did not know that they were being filmed for a political event.
Three of the four tenants in the public housing video were interviewed on Friday by The New York Times. All three said they opposed President Trump and were misled about the purpose of the video.
Perez and three other tenants were interviewed by Lynne Patton, the head of New York’s HUD office. Patton solicited the interviews ostensibly to find out more about conditions in the city’s housing projects, which have long had serious maintenance problems.
Each tenant was interviewed for over four hours. But according to Perez and two other tenants who spoke with The New York Times, Carmen Quiñones and Manny Martinez, they didn’t know it was for the GOP. Quiñones said that she only learned she had been recruited for a GOP interview once the cameras started rolling, while Perez said that she and the other tenants were only told after the interview that this was a Republican production.
Perez says that no one responded to her requests to see the clip, and only found out it was airing at the convention when Quiñones called her last night. For her part, Quiñones thought she was merely highlighting longstanding problems in city housing and had no idea it was intended for use at the convention.
This video is problematic on another count. Since Patton is a federal employee, her role in this video could raise Hatch Act issues. Patton claims the video was reviewed for potential Hatch Act problems by the White House. But we have to take that with a grain of salt, since Patton has longstanding ties to the Trump family. For years, she was an event planner at Trump golf courses, and helped plan Eric’s wedding. Apparently her only qualification for the post was her status as a Trump retainer; she had almost no previous experience in housing policy. Additionally, she’s been rapped on the knuckles before for violating the Hatch Act; last year, she was cited for displaying a Trump hat in her HUD office and liking politically-oriented tweets.
So it looks like we have our third case in this week alone where Trump improperly and potentially illegally used the power of his office for political purposes. First the naturalization ceremony, then last night’s speech at the White House, and now this.
