Get ready for the first seven words of this New York Times headline—“White House moves to block ethics inquiry”—to become very familiar over the coming months and years. That’s something the White House will likely be doing a lot. In this case, the ethics inquiry the White House is moving to block is about the number of former, and in some case very recent, lobbyists working in the White House or federal agencies on the very issues they used to lobby about.
Donald Trump signed an executive order banning lobbyists from working on issues that could benefit their former clients, but has since gone on to issue what appears to be a significant number of waivers. But since, unlike the Obama White House, the Trump White House is keeping those waivers a secret, the Office of Government Ethics is trying to find out who they are, which could make it possible to figure out what ethics rules they might be violating. The White House is telling the Office of Government Ethics to back off and stop trying to even know the names of ex-lobbyists who’ve gotten waivers:
[Agency head Walter] Shaub, who is in the final year of a five-year term after being appointed by President Barack Obama, said he had no intention of backing down. “It is an extraordinary thing,” Mr. Shaub said of the White House request. “I have never seen anything like it.”
Marilyn L. Glynn, who served as general counsel and acting director of the agency during the George W. Bush administration, called the move by the Trump White House “unprecedented and extremely troubling.”
There is, the Times reports, some question of whether the Office of Government Ethics oversees the White House as well as other federal agencies, and the Trump Office of Management and Budget is using that question to cast the validity of the entire request into doubt. But the White House’s real power to block transparency may not come from just asking the ethics office to back off:
The Office of Government Ethics, however, does not have the power to take enforcement action directly against the agencies if they do not respond. Traditionally, if it has trouble getting the information it needs, it turns to the White House to get compliance, Ms. Glynn said.
“The agency is more or less dependent on the good graces of the party that is in power,” she said.
So, yeah. Expect Donald Trump and his henchmen to decide that an ethics agency founded after Watergate has no authority over their efforts to eclipse Watergate a dozen times over.