Dems Distort Ethics Guidance To Smear Trump Appointee

Several Democrats on the House Committee on Natural Resources mischaracterized ethics guidelines in a letter to Acting Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Interior Caryl Brzymialkiewicz, pushing for an investigation into Trump appointee Matthew Giacona, government accountability watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust told The Federalist. Giacona is Acting Director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), housed under the Department of Interior (DOI).

“The minority members’ letter gets facts wrong, misreads relevant laws, and demonstrates a complete ignorance of past decisions by the OIG,” Michael Chamberlain, Director of Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) told The Federalist.

The letter alleges ethics violations involving a supposed conflict of interest between Giacona’s lobbying efforts on behalf of National Ocean Industries Association (NOIA) before joining BOEM, and his related work there.

The Democrat’s letter reveals their motives at least in part, claiming that the alleged ethics violations “are especially troubling in the midst of the Trump Administration’s ongoing attack
on energy security,” and that the supposed conflict of interest with Giacona’s former positions “appear to be central to this agenda.” Perhaps the Democrats’ concern is not over Giacona’s ethics but his position to advance the Trump Administration’s energy objectives.

However, a letter sent Monday to the Office of the DOI Inspector General (OIG) from Protect the Public’s Trust argued that the connections between Giacona’s previous positions and his work with BOEM are not the incrimination the Democrats make it out to be. PPT’s letter said it hopes to keep “the U.S. taxpayer from incurring needless expense to investigate partisan motivated, uninformed character attacks.”

PPT’s letter implies that the authors are either inept at interpreting the ethics guidelines to which they refer or “intentionally seek to misdirect the OIG into a baseless partisan investigation.”

The Democrats’ letter claims that Giacona was prohibited “from participating personally and substantially in any particular matter he knew would have a direct and predictable effect on NOIA’s financial interests” until March 2026, as is confirmed by the ethics guidance provided to Giacona.

It then makes a leap that the ethics guidance does not make, rather it refutes, implying that Giacona would have to recuse himself from NOIA’s member companies because their interests are “inherently tied” to NOIA’s.

The Democrats’ letter notes that the guidance is on file with the committee, but it does not link to a public copy as it does with most of the other sources it offers. “It’s telling that they reference, but don’t make public, a document that says precisely the opposite of what they claim it says,” Chamberlain told The Federalist.

The Departmental Ethics Office said in that guidance “that the members of NOIA are not appropriately considered [Giacona’s] clients” and that Giacona’s “covered relationship [with NOIA] does not extend to members of NOIA” like Chevron and Transocean named in the Democrats’ letter.

In other words, the ethics guidance states that Giacona’s former association with NOIA as a whole does not require him to recuse himself from association with individual members of NOIA.

The references to various meetings and correspondence then serve as “filler information” PPT’s letter argued, “merely the disingenuous appearance of relevance. In essence, a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Protect the Public’s Trust’s letter also highlights an apparent double standard between past investigations into potential conflicts of interest versus the claim brought against Giacona for his involvement in a Biological Opinion (BiOp) and lease sale project.

One of these examples involved a Biden-appointed then-Bureau of Land Management official who went on to work on “highly controversial Public Land Orders (PLOs) and litigation involving issues of high importance” to two previous employers. The Office of the Inspector General at that time determined that the PLOs were sufficiently general, and that the official “did not have a ‘covered relationship’ that would trigger application of” the relevant ethics code for the litigation.

The PPT letter also describes a similar situation in 2019 where a Department of Interior official’s former lobbying efforts were not disqualifying from being involved in the development of a biological assessment, even though its drafting and finalization were under the official’s “direct purview.”

But in Giacona’s case, PPT argued, the seeming connection is even more removed. The BiOp referenced in the Democrats’ letter was finalized under an entirely separate federal department (Commerce) from Giacona’s (Interior), with BOEM as just one of several government agencies consulting on its development.

“The BiOp is a massive, programmatic document operating at a landscape perspective, over which DOI had limited authority, and which was finalized by an agency wholly external to DOI,” the PPT writes, highlighting both the scope of the project and the limited influence it appears Giacona would have had over it. “To suggest that a reasonable person would find Mr. Giacona should recuse from BOEM’s limited work on the BiOp is not credible.”

The Federalist contacted the House Natural Resources Committee Democrats inquiring about the apparent mischaracterization of the ethics guidance and the failure to provide a public copy of that guidance in its letter.

A spokesperson for the committee told The Federalist that “The letters asks the OIG to determine whether Mr. Giacona violated ethics rules because the subject of Mr. Giacona’s meetings are the clear and particular interest of NOIA itself, with whom he has a covered relationship, not just because he met with NOIA member companies.” The spokesperson added that “fielding NOIA’s interests through its member companies is an end-run that undermines the basic purpose of our ethics rules. Those rules exist to ensure federal agencies serve the public interest, not the priorities of industry insiders.”

The response did not directly address The Federalist’s questions about a mischaracterization of the guidance and Giacona’s ethics obligations, or why the letter did not provide a public link to the guidance in its footnotes.

Catherine Gripp is a graduate of Arizona Christian University where she earned a degree in communication and a minor in political science. She writes for The Federalist as a reporting intern.