Democrats accuse Ben Carson of misleading public and hiring cronies

• Carson changes explanation for ordering pricey furniture

• Hud secretary faces sharp criticism at a Senate banking committee

Ben Carson was accused by Democrats on Thursday of misleading the public and hiring unqualified cronies, after he changed his explanation for ordering pricey furniture and two officials resigned over ethics problems.

Carson, Donald Trump’s secretary for housing and urban development (Hud), faced sharp criticism at a hearing of the Senate banking committee in Washington.

Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the committee’s senior Democrat, said Carson was filling positions at Hud “based on patronage rather than competence”, after the Guardian revealed that Carson’s chief information officer hired as an adviser a friend who has been repeatedly accused of fraud.

Brown also lambasted Carson for ordering a $31,000 dining set for his Washington office while overseeing deep cuts to public spending on services aimed at helping Americans in poverty.

“Under your leadership, Secretary Carson, Hud has decided a wobbly chair in a private DC dining room requires the urgent attention of no fewer than 16 staffers and thousands of taxpayer dollars,” Brown said in his opening remarks.

Robert Menendez of New Jersey accused Carson of making “unbelievable” false statements, after the secretary this week blamed his wife for ordering the dining set despite internal emails stating that he was involved in selecting it.

The Hud chief information officer, Johnson Joy, resigned this week after the Guardian reported that he and the adviser, Naved Jafry, ran an opaque charity. Jafry had already resigned following questions about his past.

Brown asked Carson: “Do you think it would be better to advertise and compete for these jobs rather than hiring cronies through a subcontractor?”

Carson denied doing so and laughed.

Asked why Joy had left Hud, Carson said: “I lost confidence in his ability to lead.”

Asked why he only learned of these issues from reports in the Guardian, Carson said: “As soon as I found out about the problems, we dealt with them.”

Reminding Carson that he had cautioned against making public housing so pleasant that people might want to stay in it, Menendez told him: “Apparently your aversion to comforts and extravagance don’t flow to your office.”

Last month it emerged that the $31,000 dining set had been ordered after another senior Hud official, who refused to exceed a $5,000 legal spending cap on redecoration, was reassigned to a more junior position.

Carson’s spokesman, Raffi Williams, who first falsely said the dining set did not exist, then issued a statement claiming Carson and his wife, Candy, had no involvement in the ordering of the furniture.

But in an August 2017 email subsequently released under freedom of information laws, a Hud staffer said Carson and his wife had “picked out” the furniture. Carson continued to make contradictory comments on the subject at Thursday’s hearing.

Earlier this week, in testimony to a committee of the House of Representatives, he both blamed his wife for the purchase and then gave a new explanation: that the existing furniture had been dangerous and injured someone.

“People had been stuck by nails, a chair had collapsed with somebody sitting in it,” he said.

No references to such incidents appeared in the dozens of pages of released emails relating to the furniture purchase. One official mentioned that chairs were loose and said she did not want any to break.

Asked if Carson’s testimony to Congress had been accurate, Jereon Brown, a Hud spokesman, said: “We’ll decline comment.”

Asked again if he was really refusing to say whether Carson had told the truth, he said: “We’re declining comment to you on the testimony.”

Joy was also accused of firing his executive assistant after she alleged to Hud’s internal watchdog that she had found corruption in the office’s contracting of staff from a private company.

Brown reminded Carson on Thursday that he was one of five Democrats who voted to confirm the former brain surgeon as Hud secretary last year.

“I’m not sure I made the right decision,” he said.