From TPM Muckraker's Daily Muck, we learn that Justice Department officials have been warned about the propriety of attending a pizza luncheon hosted by their former boss John Ashcroft.   The report first appeared in US News and World Report:

A pizza luncheon to be hosted this Wednesday by former Attorney General turned consultant John Ashcroft for some of his old political appointees has raised eyebrows in the Justice Department's ethics office, U.S. News has learned. The ethics office, which provides Justice employees with guidance on a wide range of ethics questions, has not prohibited invitees from attending the lunch.

However, it has "advised invitees to consider the appearance of attending such an event," Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse told U.S. News. But Juleanna Glover Weiss, an adviser and spokesperson for his consulting firm, told U.S. News that "General Ashcroft has abided by the letter and spirit of all post government service ethics restrictions." Wednesday's lunch, Weiss said, "is just a small social gathering."

Executive branch employees must comply with stringent standards of ethical conduct pertaining to accepting gifts or items of monetary value from anyone wanting to do official business with their agency, including their old colleagues and bosses. The ethics office has told political appointees at Justice that if they attend the Ashcroft pizza luncheon, it would "count toward the $20/occasion and $50/year limits."

Executive branch ethics have become a hot issue.  US News may think the standards of ethical conduct are already stringent.  We're not so sure.  Earlier this month, CREW released "Criminals and Scoundrels: The 25 most Corrupt Officials of the Bush Administration."   Just last week, Speaker Pelosi called for stricter executive branch ethics.  The Ashcroft/pizza lunch might give some added impetus.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi thinks the executive branch ethics rules need to be fixed:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for tighter ethics rules in federal agencies Wednesday after government officials approved the purchase of a $980,000 vacation home by a top Justice Department lawyer with an oil company lobbyist.

Pelosi's criticism followed an Associated Press report last week that department ethics officials did not object when Sue Ellen Wooldridge, then head of the environment division, was buying a South Carolina beach house with Donald R. Duncan, the top Washington lobbyist for ConocoPhillips.

"If in fact Ms. Wooldridge got such a pass from the ethics committee of the executive branch, then certainly the executive branch ethics process needs a look as well," Pelosi, D-Calif., said when asked about the house purchase at a San Francisco news conference.

Nine months after the purchase, Wooldridge approved an agreement that allowed ConocoPhillips an extension of pollution cleanup requirements at some of the company's refineries. The company says Duncan was not part of those negotiations.

It's almost as if people in the executive branch can't police themselves so Congress needs to step in.  

It has been a week of one Executive Branch ethics issue after another. The latest scandal was reported this morning by Associated Press. The top Justice Department environmental official purchased a vacation house with a top oil industry lobbyist -- while that same Justice Department official was overseeing cases involving that same oil industry lobbyist's company:

The inquiry by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was announced hours after The Associated Press reported that the prosecutor, Sue Ellen Wooldridge, bought a $1 million vacation home on Kiawah Island, S.C., with ConocoPhillips Vice President Donald R. Duncan, nine months before agreeing to let the company delay a half-billion-dollar pollution cleanup. It was one of two proposed consent decrees Wooldridge signed with ConocoPhillips just before resigning last month.

"There appears to be a breakdown of ethics at the Justice Department," the committee's chairman, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said Wednesday night. "Senior Justice Department officials should not be handling cases that affect their close friends and investment partners."

The third buyer of the beachshore getaway was former Deputy Interior Secretary J. Steven Griles, the highest-ranking Bush administration official targeted for criminal prosecution in the Jack Abramoff corruption probe.

In one of her last acts, Wooldridge signed proposed consent decrees with ConocoPhillips, one delaying the required installation of $525 million in pollution controls at nine refineries and the other dealing with a Superfund toxic waste cleanup.