OGDEN -- Despite what he calls the act's vagueness, Weber County Sheriff Terry Thompson remains confident, almost defiant, that he is not in violation of the Hatch Act.
The news broke in October of the Hatch Act inquiry filed against him. Thompson won the election and took office in January.
The Office of Special Counsel in Washington D.C., which investigates Hatch Act violations, finally contacted him in February.
"I haven't thought about it since," he said. The investigator talked with him on the phone, he said, for about 15 minutes.
"She called it an inquiry, not an investigation of a complaint. She'd already talked to others in the (sheriff's) office and knew what my duties involved. She talked about the layers of administration below the sheriff's position."
She didn't say who had made the complaint about him. "And I didn't ask. It's not that I don't care.
"But it's just not important to me who contacted them. I feel strongly that I'm not in violation."
Established in 1939 and named after former Sen. Carl Hatch, D-N.M., the original aim of the Hatch Act was to protect federal workers and other citizens from improper political pressure from candidates.
It has been expanded to include the political activity of state and local government workers if they are principally employed by an agency running programs financed in whole or in part by federal loans or grants.
"We can't discuss specific cases," said Darshan Sheth, spokesman for OSC, when contacted about Thompson. "In fact, we don't even confirm whether we are, or have, investigated a particular case."
Thompson's major beef with the act is its breadth, leaving it vague enough to include anyone working near federal funds, without any evidence of manipulation of the funds or what they finance.
"I have the same involvement with federal funds every police officer has who has ever worn a bullet-proof vest or used a radio," he said, referring to items typically purchased with some amount of federal funding.
Thompson said he's never signed off on federal funds.
Ogden Police Chief Jon Greiner was found in violation of the Hatch Act because he had signed off on half a dozen federal grants, valued at more than $1 million, already in place during his successful 2006 bid for the state Senate. Greiner did not seek a second Senate term after the Hatch Act ruling against him.
In October, then-Sheriff Brad Slater said he had been contacted by the OSC and informed that not only Thompson, but Capt. Brett Haycock, who filed for the sheriff's office but lost to Thompson in the Republican Party primary, had been the target of Hatch Act complaints.
Gary Haws, a Bountiful police officer who lives in West Haven and was Thompson's Democratic opponent in November, said in October he too had been the subject of a Hatch Act complaint that had been dismissed four months earlier.
Thompson said the OSC would be informing him, and the person who lodged the complaint against him, of the outcome of the inquiry. No formal time frame was set, he said.
Haws in October said he knew who made the complaint against Thompson, but would only say it was filed in June 2010 by a law enforcement officer who lived outside Weber County.
Sheth has said the OSC's Hatch Act division included about 10 investigators. Given the volume of elected positions in the country, Sheth said investigators can't possibly monitor every campaign nationwide, so must act only on complaints.
Thompson says that reduces the Hatch Act to nothing more than a political tool.
"That's what it has come to," he said.
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