Watchdog Files Ethics Complaint Against Schiff Over Senate Campaign Announcement Video
An ethics watchdog is filing an ethics complaint against Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) over a video he used in his Senate campaign announcement. The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT) sent a letter to…
An ethics watchdog is filing an ethics complaint against Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) over a video he used in his Senate campaign announcement.
The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT) sent a letter to the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) asking it to probe whether Schiff “abused official resources for political purposes” by using a video from former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial in his announcement.
“On January 26, 2023, Representative Schiff announced he was running for U.S. Senate. In his campaign announcement video, he uses a video of himself speaking on the Senate floor, as seen below,” FACT said.
The letter included a screenshot of the video which shows Schiff speaking on the Senate floor during the first impeachment trial of Trump.
“Federal law states that ‘appropriations shall be applied only to the objects for which the appropriations were made except as otherwise provided by law,'” it continued.
The letter went on:
“To enforce this law, the ethics rules prohibit Members from using any official resource for campaign or political purposes. ‘Official resources’ includes anything funded by taxpayers, such as a Member’s official website, social media accounts, and photographs and video from the House or Senate floor. To make it abundantly clear, both the House ethics rules and Senate rules specifically identify Congressional video of floor proceedings as official resources that Members are prohibited from using for political purposes.”
FACT argued, “In the present case, Rep. Schiff is clearly using official government video for campaign purposes in violation of federal law and the House ethics rules. The law is broad — not only is a Member directly prohibited from using the video, but the Member cannot repost from other sources or use video obtained from news outlets.”
“The law is clear and the image above speaks for itself — there are no facts that can excuse this violation,” it added.