The head of the Office of Government ethics wrote to Senate leaders on Friday warning that the Republican plan to push through a host of Trump's most controversial cabinet nominees in a single day is—well, he didn't say crooked, precisely, but he sure seems to be thinking it loudly.
”The announced hearing schedule for several nominees who have not completed the ethics review process is of great concern to me. This schedule has created undue pressure on OGE's staff and agency ethics officials to rush through these important reviews,” wrote OGE Director Walter Shaub. “More significantly, it has left some of the nominees with potentially unknown or unresolved ethics issues shortly before their scheduled hearings.” [...]
”This normally intensive process has been further complicated by both the Senate hearing schedule and the announcement of nominees prior to consulting OGE for an evaluation of any ethics issues,” Shaub wrote in the letter to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. “During this Presidential transition, not all of the nominees presently scheduled for hearings have completed the ethics review process. In fact, OGE has not received even initial draft financial disclosure reports for some of the nominees scheduled for hearings.”
The Office of Government Ethics is the body tasked with ensuring the people in our Government have Ethics, or at the very least are not crooks. This was long considered important—at least, until one day after the November elections, when suddenly all of the Republicans in government decided that since there was no damn way they'd ever convince Donald Trump to abide by those longstanding ethical rules, the only possible solution was to ignore those rules and call it done. So the Senate will be pushing through Trump's richest and most conflict-riddled nominees next week, before the office has gone through the tedium of determining whether or not they are, well, crooks, and if it turns out there are problems uncovered later everyone will pretend to be really red-faced about it and Go On With Their Senate Lives.
Of particular import this time around is that because so many of Trump's nominees and hangers-on have zero prior government experience, they may not even know what the rules are. And that could, if we still enforce these things a year from now, land them in jail. In November the office's head was emailing Trump aides trying to get their attention, noting that we seem to have lost contact with the Trump-Pence transition since the election."
The perils for White House staff were even more severe, Shaub argued, because they might begin their jobs without crucial ethics guidance, raising a risk of inadvertently breaking federal rules.
"They run the risk of having inadvertently violated the criminal conflicts of interest restriction at 18 USC 208," Shaub wrote, citing a federal conflicts law in an email to Trump Transition aide Sean Doocey.
On the bright side, there is some good that can come of this. Those of us that believe many of Trump's picks are either incompetent or malevolent couldn't hope for a better outcome than to see a half-dozen or so of them end up in the pokey. Sure, it'd be the rich man's pokey, with spas and tennis and goddamn butlers to carry your ball and chain around, but it'd be something.