Taxpayers have a right to know how their money is being spent, and their dollars shouldn't be used to bail out misconduct by members of Congress, said Rep. Ron DeSantis, who is drafting legislation to end secret taxpayer-funded payments.
"It's just a basic transparency issue," the Florida Republican, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, told Fox News' "Fox and Friends" program Thursday. "It was not these members' money. It was the taxpayers' money. We have to have full transparency."
His call comes in the aftermath of reports that Rep. John Conyers, D-Michigan, had allegedly used his office budget funds to pay a $27,000 harassment settlement to one of his staff workers in 2015, and making it appear that the money was paid out as an employee salary.
The money, however, came from Conyers' office funds, not from Congressional funds that DeSantis has referred to as a "slush fund," but he wants his legislation to take control of both issues.
"We need to look at the practice John Conyers was alleged to have engaged in where he used his office budget, which is a separate pot of money, to pay harassment settlement to one of his employees," said DeSantis. "When they did it they basically paid a salary. If a taxpayer was looking at it, you wouldn't know it was for harassment settlement. All those things need to be done. I think the American people are going to demand that we take action."
Conyers, who has been in office for 50 years, will face an ethics investigation, said DeSantis, and he believes there will be more people coming forward with allegations against him.
"It's a troubling set of allegations," he said. "It wasn't just that he behaved inappropriately in a moral sense. He was basically leveraging his office in order to pry sexual favors and affection from some of his staff. That is textbook harassment, and so that absolutely needs to be ferreted out."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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