Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is facing an ethics complaint over a campaign video he put together as he launched his bid for retiring Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s seat.
The video features a clip of Schiff presenting his case for then-President Donald Trump’s second impeachment on the floor of the Senate, which, according to the watchdog group Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT), is a violation of congressional rules.
“Federal law states that ‘appropriations shall be applied only to the objects for which the appropriations were made except as otherwise provided by law,'” FACT wrote in a letter to the House Ethics Committee. “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,” the letter continued.
“Simply put, under the House ethics rules, a Member is prohibited from using either House or Senate photographs or video because both are official government resources. This includes any photograph or video footage of floor proceedings even if it was reposted from a third-party source, i.e. another website or news organization. As the Ethics Committee has stated, ‘Members may not re-use an image of a floor proceeding published by a third-party, if the Member could not use that image in the first instance,'” FACT noted further, adding: “Adam Schiff thought that leading the charge on impeaching Donald Trump would be his golden ticket to the Senate.”
https://conservativebrief.com/schiff-ethics-71014/