Watchdog Hits Ex-Biden Official With Complaint For Using Govt X Account To Promote Anti-Trump Org
- March 27, 2025
Nick Pope, Daily Caller
A watchdog group filed an ethics complaint against an ex-Biden administration official on Tuesday for continuing to use a government-affiliated social media account to promote the anti-Trump organization now employing her.
Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) submitted the complaint to a host of Trump administration officials on Tuesday, alleging that Melissa Schwartz — formerly the communications director for the Biden Department of the Interior (DOI) — is improperly maintaining the appearance that her X profile is still government-affiliated as she promotes her new employer, an anti-Trump legal group called Democracy Forward. PPT argues in its complaint that Schwartz’s continued use of X’s “gray check mark,” which indicates that the account is government-affiliated, may fall afoul of National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) guidance and potentially criminal law.
Many X users pay for premium “blue check mark” status on the app, and archived accounts of former government officials typically display blue check marks after those officials leave government instead of continuing to use the gray icon, according to PPT’s complaint. The gray check mark on Schwartz’s profile says that “this account is verified because it is a government or multilateral organization account” when clicked.
“It appears that Ms. Schwartz is continuing to regularly use the same verified government X account that she used while working at the Department of the Interior despite having left the Department months ago. Doing so would seem to violate NARA’s direction that ‘social media accounts created or used for official agency business . . . stay under the control of the agency,’” the complaint adds. “Plainly, NARA cannot have control of federal records Ms. Schwartz created and/or disseminated while working as a federal employee unless those records have been appropriately segregated and archived. That does not appear to have occurred here and the account presently remains open and subject to change at any time.”