Daily Beast: White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany Is Now Formally Moonlighting as a Trump Campaign Aide

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany appears to have taken on a new gig. In addition to her role as a government employee, she’s now serving as a senior aide on her boss’s reelection campaign.

In an appearance on Fox News on Tuesday morning, McEnany was introduced as “Trump 2020 senior adviser and White House press secretary.” A few hours later, Fox Business Network host Stuart Varney introduced McEnany by saying she is “serving now as adviser for the Trump campaign.”

McEnany’s dual roles for the White House and the Trump reelection campaign immediately set off alarm bells among good-government advocates, who said they represent yet another instance of the often blurry lines between the Trump administration and the president’s political operation.

“This looks like the latest example of Trump administration officials bending and breaking ethics laws and norms,” said Paul Seamus Ryan, the vice president of litigation for the group Common Cause. “This is unfortunately par for the course for this administration.”…

While most of McEnany’s two Fox hits on Tuesday concerned the status of the Trump campaign and the 2020 race, she also weighed in on official administration policy on issues such as COVID relief negotiations with congressional Democrats.

“The chances [for a deal] are slim when you have someone like Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House,” McEnany told Varney. “If we’re providing stimulus relief for the American people, it should be just that, for American people, for United States citizens, not a wish-list from the liberal left,” McEnany told Varney.

Speaking in front of a backdrop that featured both the White House and the Trump campaign logo, McEnany also rattled off a series of policy proposals that “we offered” in those negotiations.

It’s that sort of blurry line between White House and campaign messaging, and the prospect that taxpayer resources could continue bolstering the president’s reelection effort, that concern Ryan.

“This excerpt is McEnany commenting on federal government policy currently being negotiated by the Trump administration with Congress. This is McEnany doing the work of a [White House] press secretary,” he said. “It’s permissible for someone who works in the White House to also do campaign work. They just can’t mix the two. They can’t try to do the two things simultaneously.”

Ryan compared the situation to controversy over illicit politicking by former senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, who used her official Twitter account to share political messages, leading the Office of Special Counsel to recommend her removal over violations of the Hatch Act, which bars the use of taxpayer resources for partisan purposes.

Conway brushed off the recriminations with a simple statement: “Blah blah blah.”