Mark Meadows Loved The Hatch Act—Then Trump Came Along
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows doesn’t believe that anyone in America is concerned about a law that bars members of the Trump administration from engaging in political activities—or about the particularly enthusiastic breaking of that law during the Republican National Convention this week.
“Nobody outside of the Beltway really cares—they expect that Donald Trump is going to promote Republican values and they would expect that Barack Obama, when he was in office, that he would do the same for Democrats,” Meadows told Politico on Wednesday morning, calling concerns by ethics experts “a lot of hoopla.”
But long before joining an administration famous for its casual disregard for the Hatch Act, Meadows was one of the federal law’s biggest supporters. Meadows co-sponsored multiple pieces of legislation intended to strengthen punishments for violations of the law, and was a hawkish investigator of purported Hatch Act violations by minor members of the Obama administration.