Ivanka Trump’s Murky White House Job Status

First daughter Ivanka Trump has been through several stages over the past few weeks on her way to becoming a federal employee.

On March 20, news reports said she had been assigned a prestigious West Wing White House office from which to advise her father. On March 24, several ethics groups complained that this risked a violation of financial disclosure rules to avoid conflicts of interest.

Then on March 29, she issued a statement announcing a change: “I have heard the concerns some have with my advising the president in my personal capacity while voluntarily complying with all ethics rules, and I will instead serve as an unpaid employee in the White House Office, subject to all of the same rules as other federal employees,” she said. “Throughout this process I have been working closely and in good faith with the White House counsel and my personal counsel to address the unprecedented nature of my role.”

Having already removed herself from direct management of her fashion business when her husband, Jared Kushner, also became a White House employee, Ivanka Trump then said, through her attorney Jamie Gorelick, that “she will file the financial disclosure forms required of federal employees and be bound by the same ethics rules that she had planned to comply with voluntarily.”

The move appeared to be in response to a March 24 letter of complaint sent to White House Counsel Donald McGahn by five ethics specialists: Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21; Norm Eisen, Richard Painter and Noah Bookbinder of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and Lawrence Noble, general counsel of the Campaign Legal Center. They noted that Ivanka Trump “will have a West Wing office; she will receive a security clearance; she will be issued government communications devices and, according to these reports, she will participate in high-level White House meetings on a regular basis and provide advice to the president on a broad range of issues.”

Hence, the specialists wrote, “This arrangement appears designed to allow Ms. Trump to avoid the ethics, conflict-of-interest and other rules that apply to White House employees.”

Her switch on Wednesday to full-time federal employee status, according to her attorney, follows the interpretation of White House hiring authority set out in January by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in determining that President Trump was free to hire his son-in-law Jared as a similarly central adviser.

Written by Deputy Assistant Attorney General Daniel Koffsky and titled “Application of the Anti-Nepotism Statute to a Presidential Appointment in the White House Office,” it says Title 3 Section 105(a) of the U.S. Code, “which authorizes the president to appoint employees in the White House Office ‘without regard to any other provision of law regulating the employment or compensation of persons in the government service,’ exempts positions in the White House Office from the prohibition on nepotism in Title 5 of the code.

The White House did not respond to requests for clarification by publication time.

A spokesman for CREW told Government Executive that the Trump White house is being “less than transparent” by not doing a formal announcement that clarified Ivanka Trump’s status. One possibility, he said, is that she is a special government employee, a temporary status created in the early 1960s to bring in special skills and thought to encompass fewer than 100 in agencies today. That status was used by top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin during Clinton’s years as President Obama’s first secretary of State.