Claims of ‘Witch Hunt’ at Housing Dept.

WASHINGTON — A senior administrator at the Department of Housing and Urban Development accused department officials on Tuesday of conducting a “witch hunt” against whistleblowers and demanded that Ben Carson, the HUD secretary, acknowledge that his wife had pressured officials to approve an expensive renovation of his office.

In a letter to Carson, Marcus Smallwood, the director of records and information, also said he was forced to speed up the release of emails that would portray Lynne Patton, a former top aide to Carson and Trump family friend who was transferred last year to the department’s New York office, in a favorable light.

The letter comes a week after HUD’s former chief administrative officer, Helen G. Foster, said that Carson’s wife, Candy Carson, had instructed a subordinate to circumvent federal laws prohibiting expenditures of more than $5,000 to replace worn-out furniture in the secretary’s sprawling 10th-floor office suite.

Last week, Ben Carson ordered the cancellation of a $31,000 contract for a custom-ordered mahogany dining room set — a table, sideboard, hutch, chairs and two $1,050 side chairs after the contract, which violated the $5,000 rule, was reported in the news media.

A department spokesman, Raffi Williams, said that Carson and his employees were “cooperating fully” with investigators and that Freedom of Information Act“requests are typically processed in the order they are received.”

Smallwood said he wrote the letter because Carson had called Foster’s complaint to the independent Office of Special Counsel, a federal whistleblower agency, unsubstantiated last week in a Twitter post.

“The secretary basically called her a liar,” he said.

Williams said in an email that the letter “is under review.”

After news of Foster’s charges were first reported, Carson, speaking through a department spokesman, initially said that he and his wife had no prior knowledge of the purchase. In a statement, he said he was “as surprised as anyone” that his staff had apparently approved a furniture purchase in excess of the annual income of many families served by his department’s housing and community development programs.

The old set, which has been used by every secretary since 1965, is “beyond repair” and unsafe, Carson added in the statement.

But Carson modified that account in a Facebook post on Monday, acknowledging that he had provided some comment about the set, and that his wife had expressed a preference for the color of the cushions.

“I briefly looked at catalogs for dining furniture and was shocked by the cost of the furniture,” he wrote. “My wife asked if used furniture was an option. Our acquisition process did not allow for that.”

“We were told there was a $25,000 budget that had to be used by a certain time or it would be lost. I indicated that they needed to take care of the needs of the deputy secretary out of that money too,” he continued. “My wife also looked at the catalogs and wanted to be sure that the color of the chair fabric of any set that was chosen matched the rest of the decour.”

Last week, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., chairman of the House Oversight Committee, requested a wide range of documents and emails relating to the redecorating and Foster’s complaint.

In his letter, Smallwood also claimed that most of his department had been singled out for “retribution” because they refused to cooperate with requests from Carson’s staff.

“Helen Foster is not the only person at HUD that has been persecuted in this witch hunt under your watch. The rest of us have operated in fear,” he wrote, adding that about 30 employees in his division had been denied access to their annual agency performance plans, leaving them adrift and ineligible for performance-based bonuses.

“I made a decision to speak out even though I know I might be fired,” said Smallwood, who serves at the discretion of Carson. “But somebody had to speak out.”