First posted on Instagram
The complaint arrived on Thursday at the Senate Select Committee on Ethics. Michael Bicksel — the University of Chicago student whose recording of Senator Elissa Slotkin’s campus remarks went viral earlier this month — filed it himself, asking the committee to investigate whether the Michigan Democrat’s comments amounted to “improper conduct which may reflect upon the Senate,” the ethics-manual standard for conduct that can be unethical even when it breaks no specific law or Senate rule.
The remarks date to an October 13 event at the University of Chicago. In the clip that spread widely, Slotkin said she wants to pursue “signature cases” against people who “enabled” President Donald Trump, and to deliver a deterrence message to young graduates weighing a job in his administration: “I want young people coming out of school to say, ‘Should I go work for the Trump administration? Like, that sounds fun, I might get an opportunity.’ I want them to be like, ‘Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that.’” Then she added: “I want that deterrence message sent.”
Bicksel’s filing argues that Slotkin laid out a legislative-oversight agenda that used the legal process to “terrorize members of the Trump administration in order to ‘deter’ young people from going to work for it.” Her target, he wrote, was not criminals but students: “Her target was ‘young people coming out of school’ (like me and my classmates) who are debating whether they should ‘go work for the Trump administration.’” “We are obviously not debating — as she subsequently tried to clarify — whether to go commit crimes or behave unethically,” he continued. “Those who commit crimes should be punished for doing so. No one disagrees with that. All we are debating is public service, pure and simple, and Senator Slotkin says we should think twice about doing so because it might provoke the full power of the United States Senate.”
“As a college student and a conservative, this was a shocking thing to hear,” Bicksel wrote. “A prominent U.S. Senator came to my college and laid out a goal that I and my peers should be afraid to serve our country in the executive branch. This is well below the standard of conduct expected of a U.S. Senator and deserves investigation by the Senate Select Committee on Ethics and appropriate subsequent disciplinary action.”
Slotkin has pushed back. Pressed on CNN about the reaction, she called the controversy “manufactured outrage.” Her office pointed Fox News Digital to a statement she issued Tuesday: “A president from the Oval Office is weaponizing our justice system against an American who clearly gets under his skin,” she said. “And if he can do it to me, he can do it to anyone,” adding that Trump supporters use a “coordinated play to threaten, intimidate, and silence anyone who speaks up.”
The dispute is running on more than one track. The Washington Examiner reported Wednesday that the Justice Department is facing calls to investigate Slotkin over the remarks. The remarks have also reached the White House: on October 20, President Trump cited them in the Oval Office while launching his fraud-whistleblower program, saying Democrats “want to frighten people” — “I heard it from Elissa Slotkin.”