Nearly everyone on Donald Trump’s staff has lawyered up in recent months as Special Counsel Robert Mueller creeps closer and closer to the oval office. No doubt those legal defense bills are rolling in and starting to add up. Who’s going to pay those bills? It seems Donald Trump and company are turning directly to The Swamp to pay the tab. The kicker? They don’t even want you to know who’s paying their bills. They changed the White House ethics rules to allow for anonymous donations to their legal defense fund. For all we know, the Russians are picking up the tab. From Politico:
The U.S. Office of Government Ethics has quietly reversed its own internal policy prohibiting anonymous donations from lobbyists to White House staffers who have legal defense funds.
The little-noticed change could help President Donald Trump’s aides raise the money they need to pay attorneys as the Russia probe expands — but raises the potential for hidden conflicts of interest or other ethics trouble.
“You can picture a whole army of people with business before the government willing to step in here and make [the debt] go away,” said Marilyn Glynn, a former George W. Bush-era acting OGE director who worked in the office for 17 years.
What could go wrong? Anonymous donations straight from The Swamp or foreign governments? This is a total embarrassment for the White House ethics office. As Walter Shaub, the former director of U.S. Office of Government Ethics, he wouldn’t even want to list the job on his resume at this point: