Former Rep. Jason Chaffetz has a new gig. The Utah Republican and one-time House Government Oversight Committee chairman is now a distinguished fellow at the Government Accountability Institute, a conservative think tank.
The Government Accountability Institute says its goal is to investigate and expose government corruption, misuse of taxpayer money and crony capitalism. Chaffetz said he reached out to co-founder and author Peter Schweizer because he was a “big fan” of his work.
“He’s very good at going after and exposing cronyism and bad government,” Chaffetz said. “He’s masterful at pointing out and exposing conflicts of interest and I still have that itch to put as much sunlight on government as possible and this will allow me to do it.”
Chaffetz, who previously worked as a chief of staff to former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, served in the U.S. House from 2009 to 2017, and announced that year he would not seek reelection. He left before his term ended and became a Fox News contributor.
The institute was founded in 2012 by Schweizer and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who was charged last year with defrauding donors as part of a crowdfunding campaign to privately build a border wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Bannon pled not guilty and was pardoned by former President Donald Trump hours before Trump left office. Bannon left the institute in 2016 and has not been affiliated with the group since.
Government Accountability Institute is chaired by conservative megadonor Rebekah Mercer, who’s also invested in conservative media companies including Breitbart News and the since-deplatformed social network Parler. She also invested in the now-defunct British data firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked with former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and harvested personal information from more than 50 million Facebook users without their permission in the lead-up to the election.
While other government accountability groups were busy during Trump’s time in office — the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington found 3,737 conflicts of interest by Trump, for example — GAI largely avoided going after the Trump administration, though it did publish a report about alleged conflicts of interest by former Trump Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.
Instead, the group focuses mainly on Democrats.
In 2015, it found success with Schweizer’s book “Clinton Cash,” which investigated donations from foreign entities to the Clinton Foundation. Reporting from the book made its way to The New York Times, achieving Bannon’s aim of “anchor left, pivot right,” or getting the group’s work picked up in the left-wing and mainstream press and then allowing right-wing media to amplify it for maximum exposure, according to Bloomberg Businessweek columnist Joshua Green, who spoke about the group to NPR in 2019.
Chaffetz said he’s been given “free rein” by the institute to dive into any area that he wants, and that he’s not opposed to also investigating Republicans.
“There’s no shortage of material,” Chaffetz said. “There is always somebody doing something stupid somewhere.”
In a statement, Schweizer said the group was looking forward to Chaffetz joining to “expose corruption at all levels of government.”