politico.com
How House members quietly sidestep harassment claims
By MAGGIE SEVERNS and MARIANNE LEVINE
9-11 minutes

Members of Congress and government watchdogs are questioning why a little-known House agency used taxpayer funds to investigate a sexual harassment complaint involving Rep. Blake Farenthold’s office last year, and then failed to make the results public.

The Office of House Employment Counsel operates under the auspices of the House clerk’s office and advises members on employment practices. It also facilitates investigations into employee complaints, a spokesperson confirmed to POLITICO. But what happens afterward is murky: The office appears to serve House members and their offices — not necessarily the employees — and makes no public accounting of its determinations or its expenditures.

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A spokesperson for the office declined to say how many sexual harassment complaints or other investigations it’s handled in recent years, citing attorney-client privilege. It also declined to reveal the firms that it hired or the amount paid to them. In addition, both Democratic and Republican House leadership offices declined to answer questions about the internal investigations.

The revelation that there is a separate office facilitating and paying for sexual harassment investigations, with little transparency and apparently little oversight, rankled critics of Congress’ handling of sexual harassment, who said that without established procedures and a commitment to transparency, the office may be playing more of a role covering up offenses than revealing them.

"It's extremely troubling that there's all these different ways of avoiding even minimal oversight,” said Emily Martin, general counsel at the National Women’s Law Center. The Office of House Employment Counsel “seems to be a really opaque structure, within a process itself that's hard for victims to understand [and] hard for people to figure out how to navigate. This is just one more layer of confusion and one more layer of obscurity that keeps the public from understanding what's going on here."

Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-Va.), who has advocated for releasing more information on sexual harassment on Capitol Hill, said the Office of House Employment Counsel’s secret investigations into sexual harassment disputes are an example of why there needs to be more transparency.

“Its taxpayer dollars and members are public figures, so we need to account for money that’s expended because of things that went on in the office,” Comstock said.

Farenthold contacted the Office of House Employment Counsel about complaints from two aides about alleged sexual harassment by another aide and gender discrimination by his chief of staff. The office recommended an outside law firm and paid for lawyers to interview Farenthold’s staff, his spokesperson Stacey Daniels told POLITICO.

“Mr. Farenthold did not spend any personal or campaign resources on this investigation,” Daniels said.

The internal investigation and its results were not disclosed publicly, and both Democratic and Republican House leadership told POLITICO they were unaware of the probe. Former Farenthold aide Elizabeth Peace, who made one of the complaints in February 2016, said she never saw any report on the investigation or was briefed on its results.

“I never saw the actual results of [the investigation], and I never felt like the situation was handled,” said Peace, who raised the allegations that coworkers were committing sexual harassment. The lawyers who came in “seemed to blow off what I thought were very valid concerns,” Peace said. One lawyer told Peace her complaints did not amount to sexual harassment, but she didn’t receive any further information about what happened with the investigation, Peace said.

Daniels disputed Peace’s characterization of the investigation but offered no specifics, stating only in an email, “We disagree.”

But the notion that taxpayer funds would be used for an investigation that lacked any visible standards, and left complainants feeling mistreated, further rankled government watchdogs.

“I would say that the public — and, certainly, Mr. Farenthold’s constituents — have a right to know what’s going on there,” said Meredith McGehee, executive director at the government watchdog group Issue One. “Otherwise, how can you make an informed decision about the person representing you?”

McGehee, who advocated for the creation of the Office of Compliance, which oversees employee complaints, in the 1990s, said she was not aware the Office of House Employment Counsel was involved in sexual harassment or other similarly delicate disputes.

However, the Office of House Employment Counsel appears to have played a role in other delicate staff-related issues in addition to the one involving Farenthold’s office. The Washington Times recently reported that Arizona Democratic Rep. Raul Grijalva consulted the office on handling a dispute involving an employee who eventually accepted a $48,000 severance package, though Grijalva did not specify the nature of the complaint.

“On the advice of House Employment Counsel, I provided a severance package to a former employee who resigned,” Grijalva told the newspaper. “The severance did not involve the Office of Compliance and at no time was any allegation of sexual harassment made, and no sexual harassment occurred.”

The office’s investigation into Farenthold’s chief of staff came only a year after the member himself had been accused himself of sexual harassment in a lawsuit and investigated by the Office of Congressional Ethics. It is unclear whether any details of the workplace investigation in 2016 were shared with other investigative bodies such as the ethics office or the House Ethics Committee. House leaders and the Office of House Employment Counsel declined to say whether the counsel shares information with other investigative bodies.

Citing attorney-client privilege, the Office of House Employment Counsel also declined to answer questions from POLITICO on how many investigations it helped facilitate and pay for in recent years, how much money it has paid to outside firms, and which law firms conducted the investigations.

“As needed, OHEC may arrange for an independent firm to conduct investigations of an office so that a determination can be made whether there is a need for the office to take appropriate corrective actions,” a House Office of Employment Counsel spokesperson said in an email.

Spokespeople for both House Speaker Paul Ryan and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi disclaimed any knowledge of the counsel office’s investigations or policies.

“We have no independent knowledge of how or in what way OHEC/independent investigation was used or conducted,” Ryan spokesperson AshLee Strong said in an email.

Farenthold has denied the allegations raised in the 2015 sexual harassment lawsuit, and the Office of Congressional Ethics investigation cleared him of wrongdoing. On December 1, however, the House Ethics Committee revived its own probe of Farenthold when it came to light that Lauren Greene, the former aide who sued Farenthold for sexual harassment, had received $84,000 in taxpayer money as a settlement for her lawsuit. On Thursday, the 56-year-old Farenthold, who was first elected in 2010, announced that he will not seek reelection next year.

Peace and another former Farenthold aide described the office as a difficult environment in which the congressman would make inappropriate sexual comments about women, including about female reporters and other members of Congress. Those aides’ accounts of Farenthold’s office echo those of Greene, who alleged that Farenthold told staffers that “a female lobbyist had propositioned him for a ‘threesome.’”

“I remember Farenthold having discussions with me about which bartender he had a crush on,” Peace told POLITICO. “If he had set a tone of professionalism and maturity ... I don’t think the rest of the employees would have acted the way they did.”

Legal and ethics experts interviewed by POLITICO said they weren’t aware the Office of House Employment Counsel ever hired outside offices to investigate sexual harassment complaints.

Seven lawyers who specialize in employment law or white-collar investigations in Washington told POLITICO this was the first time they had heard of the Office of House Employment Counsel bringing in an outside investigator to examine workplace complaints in a congressional office, and they raised some questions about the practice.

The lawyers noted it is unclear whether the Office of House Employment Counsel represents the interests of the lawmaker, the staff or Congress as a whole — particularly when it comes to conflicts between aides, as occurred in Farenthold’s office. On its website, the office says it provides “legal assistance to employing offices” and “may also provide legal representation for these offices.”

Lynne Bernabei, partner at the employee-side firm Bernabei & Kabat, told POLITICO that staffers should be wary of trusting such an internal investigation.

“There’s nobody that looks out for U.S. House of Representatives or the government, they’re looking out for the members’ interests, no matter which party,” she said.

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