By Rachael Bade
01/31/17 06:31 PM EST
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At a private GOP conference meeting, House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte tried to reduce concerns over the unusual arrangement. | Getty
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News that House Judiciary Committee staffers secretly collaborated on Donald Trump’s controversial immigration order reverberated through the Capitol on Tuesday: Democrats denounced the arrangement, the GOP panel stonewalled, and an outside ethics group requested an investigation.
And the man most on the hot seat over the unusual arrangement, House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, was in full-on cleanup mode.
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At a private GOP conference meeting, Goodlatte (R-Va.) tried to calm fellow Republicans who were incensed to learn that some of his aides helped craft Trump's immigration directive without telling him or GOP leaders or about it. Publicly, Goodlatte and his staff refused to answer further questions about the arrangement, which was first reported by POLITICO on Monday.
Democrats, meanwhile, almost immediately began raising ethical concerns about nondisclosure agreements signed by the Judiciary aides — and questioned whether such work infringes on separation of powers.
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Congress
Hill staffers secretly worked on Trump's immigration order
By Rachael Bade, Jake Sherman and Josh Dawsey
"[Minority] Leader [Nancy] Pelosi has spoken to [Judiciary] Ranking Member [John] Conyers concerning this issue, and the two agreed their staffs would closely examine this matter given the conflicting accounts about Chairman Goodlatte's role," Drew Hammill, a Pelosi spokesman, said in a statement. He was referring to questions about what exactly Goodlatte knew about his employees’ work for Trump's transition on the executive order.
Asked about the matter by Rep. Bill Flores (R-Texas) at the closed-door GOP session, Goodlatte said he gave his staff permission to advise the transition team. A committee spokeswoman, however, said Monday he did not know about the executive order specifically.
On Tuesday, panel aides refused to say how specifically the staffers contributed to the executive order, why they did not tell Republican leaders about their work and whether they took a leave of absence from their official duties to help the transition team.
Goodlatte told lawmakers during the conference meeting that his aides merely gave policy advice and did not know anything about the timing of the executive order or its final contents.
“To be clear, while they gave advice to the new administration, they did not have decision-making authority on the policy,” Goodlatte said in a statement. “The final decision was made at the highest levels of the Trump administration… My staff had no control of the language contained in the President’s executive order, the timing of the announcement, the rollout and subsequent implementation, and the coordination with Congress.”
Goodlatte's comments appear to conflict with those made by the White House. A senior administration official told reporters on Sunday that “Republicans on Capitol Hill wrote" the order and "the top drafters of this were the top immigration experts on Capitol Hill.”
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