Robert Wood Johnson IV, the American ambassador to Britain, is under fire over allegations that, at President Trump's direction, he solicited the British government's help in having the British Open golf tournament held at a Trump-owned course in Scotland.
Mr. Johnson, whose house on Highway Behind the Pond in East Hampton Village was the site of a fund-raiser for Mr. Trump shortly before the 2016 election, is also facing accusations of racist and sexist behavior during his tenure as ambassador, which began in 2017.
The New York Times reported last month that Mr. Johnson, an heir to the Johnson and Johnson pharmaceutical fortune and an owner of the New York Jets football team, told colleagues in February 2018 that the president had asked him to try to have the tournament held at the Trump Turnberry Resort. He said his deputy had warned him not to, for ethical reasons, but that he had done so anyway.
The deputy, Lewis Lukens, confirmed last month in a text message to National Public Radio that Mr. Johnson had told him of the president's request, and on Aug. 5, he told Rachel Maddow on MSNBC that The Times's reporting was accurate. "The ambassador came back from a meeting at the White House," he said. "The very next morning he came and talked to me, said, 'The president wants me to do this, who should I talk to, how should I go about doing it?' I said, 'You can't, you shouldn't do it. It's unethical, probably illegal.' A couple weeks later, he asked again. I gave him the same answer."
Mr. Lukens said he had been informed that Mr. Johnson had nonetheless broached the subject, directly after meeting with the then-secretary of state for Scotland. "I let Washington know," he told Ms. Maddow, "but also kept detailed notes on my own of what was happening at the time."
Mr. Johnson's action, he told her, was "a clear example of trying to use U.S. government resources and the position of U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James to line the president's pocket, to promote his personal business, and support his personal financial interests." It was "a violation of the oath of the Constitution that we take as diplomats, and the ambassador took right before he came to London: Protect and serve the American people and the American Constitution, not the president's personal financial interests."
The Times reported that in January 2019 Mr. Johnson, who assumed his role as ambassador with no prior experience in diplomacy, terminated Mr. Lukens, whose 30-year diplomatic career included posts in Dublin, Baghdad, and Senegal, after Mr. Lukens, while speaking at a British university, "told a positive anecdote" about President Barack Obama.
A routine review of the embassy took a team from the inspector general's office of the State Department to London in the fall of 2019. Normally, that team would write a report, Mr. Lukens told Ms. Maddow, that would be sent to the embassy for review and commentary. "At that point, the report sort of screeched to a halt," he said. The president fired Steve Linick, the inspector general, on May 15. He was one of five inspectors general Mr. Trump dismissed in a six-week span in April and May.
Mr. Linick, The Times reported separately, was fired at the urging of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo after his office opened investigations into Mr. Pompeo's "potential misuse of department resources and his effort to push arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates." His successor, Stephen Akard, resigned after fewer than three months on the job.
Mr. Trump, who has been reported by The Washington Post to have made more than 20,000 false or misleading claims as president, denied telling Mr. Johnson to steer the British Open to his resort, according to The Times.
A State Department spokeswoman did not specifically address multiple questions posed by The Star. In an Aug. 12 email, she said that Mr. Johnson "is a valued member of the team who has led the Mission UK honorably and professionally. We stand by Ambassador Johnson and look forward to him continuing to ensure our special relationship with the UK is strong."
That statement is identical to one quoted by CNN, which reported last month that the inspector general's office was also investigating allegations of racist and sexist comments made to embassy staff, including "cringeworthy" comments about women's appearances and racist generalizations about Black men. The Times reported on Aug. 12 that Mr. Johnson had urged State Department investigators to omit those allegations from its report.
On July 22, Mr. Johnson wrote on Twitter that claims of insensitive remarks about race and gender were false and "totally inconsistent with my longstanding record and values."
But the State Department's report on its inspection of the embassy in London, issued this month — much later than would be typical, Mr. Lukens indicated — stated that questionnaires and interviews with embassy employees indicated that Mr. Johnson "sometimes made inappropriate or insensitive comments on topics generally considered Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO)-sensitive, such as religion, sex, or color."
Two Democratic legislators, Representative Kathleen Rice of New York's Fourth Congressional District and Representative Ted Lieu of California, asked Christopher Wray, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to investigate whether Mr. Johnson's conversation with the Scottish secretary of state constituted solicitation of a bribe. "Your referral has been documented and forwarded to the appropriate FBI division for handling," reads a letter to the representatives from the bureau's Office of Congressional Affairs dated last Thursday.
Mr. Lukens told Ms. Maddow what he thinks of the episode: "This administration, to my mind, has shown a disdain for ethics and longstanding traditions of not mixing personal business with public employees. At the end of the day, the ethics rules and guidelines were violated."
Mr. Lieu told Ms. Maddow on Aug. 6 that the House Foreign Affairs Committee had issued subpoenas to several officials and that he had interviewed Mr. Linick. "It's pretty clear that he had no basis for getting fired," he said. "This is part of a pattern of corruption that we see in the State Department." Mr. Johnson, he said, should resign.
