Following Donald Trump’s flaming circus tent/press conference at which he announced his boys would be keeping his chair warm at the company he would continue to own and continue to profit from while he was gilding the White House, the head of the government ethics office had a few comments.
The idea of limiting direct communication about the business is wholly inadequate. That’s not how a blind trust works. …
the plan does not comport with the tradition of our Presidents over the past 40 years. This isn’t the way the Presidency has worked since Congress passed the Ethics in Government Act in 1978 in the immediate aftermath of the Watergate scandal.
But in the era of Donald Trump, you don’t criticize the president for a failure of ethics. You criticize the ethics office for not praising Trump.
House Republicans have found a subject for their opening review of conflicts of interest under Donald Trump: the federal official in charge of investigating conflicts of interest.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the head of the House Oversight Committee, criticized the director of the federal Office of Government Ethics on Thursday over his criticism of Donald Trump’s plan to address conflicts of interest. And he threatened to subpoena the official, Walter Shaub, if he refuses to participate in an official interview.
That’s right. The way they plan to resolve any issue around Trump’s conflict of interest is by eliminating anyone who brings it up.
Chaffetz doesn’t just plan on dragging in the director.
“I want to talk about the whole department,” Chaffetz said in an interview. “Mr. Shaub has taken a very aggressive stance on issues he’s never looked at. He’s raised a bunch of eyebrows.”
On issues he’s never looked at? That’s right in a way. Shaub may have plenty of experience with actual blind trusts, as have been set up by presidents during the past 40 years. He has no experience with presidents trying to pass off a whatever-it-is that Trump is planning.
“They are saying lay off Trump and push through these nominees or we’ll kill the funding of OGE,” [former ethics adviser under Bush] Painter said. He and other ethics lawyers from both parties said the agency plays an important role, and killing it or reducing its authority would be a blow to avoiding conflicts of interest in a new administration and enforcing basic standards of ethics and transparency.
Which sounds like a very good reason why Chaffetz has the ethics office in his sights. Start by eliminating the office of ethics, then you can skip all those other tedious discussions about conflicts of interest. And remember, this is the same Congress whose first order of business was to try and gut their own ethics mechanism.
Chaffetz previously called in IRS Commissioner John Koskinen and subjected him to hearings and threats of impeachment, despite the fact that there was no evidence Koskinen had done anything wrong. That may not seem ethical, but then … who is going to tell Chaffetz?