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Rep. Jason Chaffetz met Monday with the federal ethics official he chided for criticizing President Donald Trump's plans to handle business interests, saying the meeting was not an investigation — as he previously hinted at — but rather a chance to clear the air.
"All we were trying to do was get together and have a discussion about what to do," Chaffetz said after the closed-door interview.
And with that, the ongoing friction between the congressman and Walter Shaub Jr., director of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), came to a quiet end. Both officials walked away calling it a "very productive" meeting.
Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, had called out Shaub in a letter on Jan. 12, citing instances where he believed the ethics agency was "blurring the line between public relations and official ethics guidance," according to a copy published by The New York Times.
The Utah Republican included in the message a series of tweets posted by Shaub on Nov. 30 from the official OGE account that celebrated Trump's divestiture. The problem? The president had taken no such action. He plans instead to hand over his company assets to his two sons and limit new foreign investments.
Chaffetz has said the move is appropriate, noting that Trump complied with the necessary financial disclosures and is otherwise "exempt." The business model falls short of what Shaub and other ethics officials had called for — with one group filing a lawsuit Monday urging the newly appointed president to divest entirely.
After the meeting Monday, Shaub briefly stopped to speak with reporters, calling the private conversation with Chaffetz and nine Democratic members of the oversight committee "extremely useful."
"We had a very candid exchange," he said.
Chaffetz viewed the meeting as an informal discussion of grievances, saying there are no official recommendations or actions coming out of it. Though the congressman did note that "we made our point."
"I think we better understand each other," he said. "I expressed my frustration and I think it happened in a bipartisan way."
Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Democrat and ranking member of the committee, said there was concern on both sides of the aisle about the tweets.
"There was a consensus that it didn't seem professional," he said.
Cummings had previously berated Chaffetz for calling for a review of the matter, though, and noted after the meeting Monday that the Office of Government Ethics should not be threatened. He also admonished Trump's chief of staff, Reince Priebus, for comments made on ABC News' "This Week." Priebus had said Shaub "ought to be careful" about his public statements.
"There was one thing that stood out for me and that was [Shaub] said that the comments of the president's chief of staff had a chilling effect," Cummings said after the interview.
There was also some doubt over whether the Monday meeting would take place. Chaffetz and Shaub have had some back-and-forth over when they would get together. Chaffetz told Politico earlier this month that Shaub had refused to meet with him and that he'd issue a subpoena if there wasn't compliance with the interview request (a threat he later rescinded).
The ethics official, however, pointed to emails released by OGE on Thursday to say the congressman was the one to sidestep a tentative Dec. 8 meeting. The time for that was never confirmed by Chaffetz's office.
The group did finally meet Monday for about an hour and fifteen minutes — just shy of the 90 scheduled minutes.
"I had a little bit of a difficult time getting him to come visit with us," Chaffetz said afterward. "It was not nearly as difficult as he thought it was going to be. It should be a little easier to communicate. I think we both understand that. Everybody's blood pressure is coming down here."
Shaub was also under fire for comments he made at a Brookings Institution news conference on Jan. 11, saying Trump's plan to reduce his conflicts of interest was "meaningless." Chaffetz has said he penned his letter before those remarks.
Shaub responded a few days later by noting they were "in line" with his position as a government watchdog.
The Office of Government Ethics is an independent, nonpartisan group that has advised the executive branch on ethics and potential conflicts of interest since 1978, serving both Democrats and Republicans. President Barack Obama appointed Shaub as director in January 2013 with a term set to expire in January 2018.
The office is due for reauthorization, an evaluation process conducted by the committee to rethink an office's mission or redefine its priorities. Chaffetz said Monday that Shaub's comments won't negatively affect that. Other federal agencies, though, have gone much longer without reauthorization. OGE's lapsed in 2007. The Federal Election Commission? 1981, according to a Politico piece from February.
The tweets also aren't the first time Chaffetz has disapproved of Shaub or OGE. In 2015, Chaffetz disagreed with the office's dismissal of Hillary Clinton's failure to disclose speaking fees garnered by her and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, because they were paid to the Clinton Foundation.
The congressman has doggedly vowed to keep at an investigation of Clinton and has rebuffed calls by Democrats to look into Trump, saying it would be a "fishing expedition."
A majority of Utahns — 65 percent — would like him to reverse course, though, and examine the president's business plans, according to a recent poll by The Salt Lake Tribune and the Hinckley Institute of Politics.
And yet there is one topic on which Chaffetz has asked for information about a Trump business interest. He has requested details on the lease of a hotel Trump owns in Washington, D.C., just a few blocks from the White House. The agreement with the government's General Services Administration seems to preclude any government official from owning that building.
Twitter: @CourtneyLTanner