Shortly after his inauguration, President George H. W. Bush counseled freshly minted White House appointees that, “It’s not really very complicated. It’s a question of knowing right from wrong, avoiding conflicts of interest, bending over backwards to see that there’s not even a perception of conflict of interest.
.. By holding themselves to the same exacting standards as the rest of the executive branch, they sent a clear message to those serving under them.
.. This tradition came to an abrupt stop with President Trump. By continuing to hold onto his businesses and effectively advertising them through frequent visits to his properties, our leader creates the appearance of profiting from the presidency. As things stand, we can’t know whether policy aims or personal financial interests motivate his decisions as president. Whatever his intentions may be, the resulting uncertainty casts a pall of doubt over governmental decision-making.
.. Every past administration actively supported O.G.E.’s work and respected it for taking stands when necessary. That White House support provided the office with the leverage it needed to fulfill its mission.
.. The Office of Government Ethics has been performing the same service it has always provided with respect to the current administration’s nominees. In fact, I have succeeded in moving President Trump’s nominees on average almost a week (six days to be exact) faster than I moved President Obama’s nominees during the last presidential transition, without compromising O.G.E.’s high standards. I am particularly proud of this accomplishment because this administration’s nominees generally hold far more complex financial interests than the last administration’s nominees, a circumstance that would normally be expected to slow O.G.E.’s work.
.. The press secretary touts one of the president’s commercial enterprises as the “winter White House,” and the State Department has publicized it around the globe.
A White House lawyer made the extraordinary assertion that “many regulations promulgated by the Office of Government Ethics (‘OGE’) do not apply to employees of the Executive Office of the President.”
Appearing to echo this view, the Office of Management and Budget challenged O.G.E.’s authority to collect routine ethics records.
Even some presidential nominees have pushed back against ethics processes with uncommon intensity.
.. the very official charged with responsibility for White House ethics, the counsel to the president. His office recently ginned up ten unsigned, undated waivers, many of which seem intended to have retroactive effect, raising the specter of a possible effort to paper over ethics violations. Worse, the counsel appears to be both issuer and recipient of two waivers.
.. Defenders of the status quo also seem unwilling to acknowledge the existence of a problem absent clear evidence of significant violations. This argument risks legitimizing an approach of bare minimum legal compliance. The existence or absence of identified violations is not the only measure of an ethics program — no program can detect every violation and those detected are often hard to prove.
.. Those systems depend on adherence to ethical norms.
.. Recent experiences have convinced me that the existing mechanism is insufficient. The Office of Government Ethics needs greater authority to obtain information from the executive branch, including the White House. The White House and agencies lacking inspectors general need investigative oversight, which should be coordinated with O.G.E.
.. Because we can no longer rely on presidents to comply voluntarily with ethical norms, we need new laws to address their conflicts of interest, their receipt of compensation for the use of their names while in office, nepotism and the release of tax forms.
.. Disclosure requirements can be refined and the revolving door tightened.
Trump Aides Recruited Businessmen to Devise Options for Afghanistan
Erik D. Prince, a founder of the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide, and Stephen A. Feinberg, a billionaire financier who owns the giant military contractor DynCorp International, have developed proposals to rely on contractors instead of American troops in Afghanistan at the behest of Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, and Jared Kushner
.. “The conflict of interest in this is transparent,” said Sean McFate, a professor at Georgetown University who wrote a book about the growth of private armies, “The Modern Mercenary.” “Most of these contractors are not even American, so there is also a lot of moral hazard.”
.. Mr. Prince laid out his views in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in May. He called on the White House to appoint a viceroy to oversee the country and to use “private military units” to fill the gaps left by departed American soldiers.
.. Mr. Prince mustered an army-for-hire for the United Arab Emirates. He has cultivated close ties to the Trump administration; his sister, Betsy DeVos, is Mr. Trump’s education secretary.
.. in essence, that the private sector can operate “cheaper and better than the military” in Afghanistan.
.. his strategy would also give the C.I.A. control over operations in Afghanistan, which would be carried out by paramilitary units and hence subject to less oversight than the military
.. Mr. Bannon has also questioned what the United States has gotten for the $850 billion in nonmilitary spending it has poured into the country, noting that Afghanistan confounded the neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration and the progressives in the Obama administration.
Name Your Pick for TrumpWorld’s Worst Cabinet Member
Who do you think is Donald Trump’s worst cabinet member?
In a normal world we would never be asking this question because, of course, you would have no idea. In a normal world, an American who could come up with two cabinet names besides the secretary of state’s would be regarded as an unusually dedicated citizen.
.. Under normal circumstances we do not talk a whole lot about, say, the secretary of housing and urban development. You would be forgiven for forgetting that this one is Ben Carson. Until you heard that the new head of the department’s massive New York-New Jersey office is going to be the woman who planned Eric Trump’s wedding.
.. Tom Price, secretary of health and human services — he of the “Mr. President, what an incredible honor …” quote. This is the guy who’s got a woman who doesn’t believe in contraception in charge of a government program on family planning.
Price also has a sleazy history of advocating legislation that could boost profits for health care companies whose stocks he was betting on. And I haven’t even mentioned that he’s supposed to be the administration’s titan of Trumpcare.
.. she froze Obama-era reforms aimed at protecting students who enroll in for-profit schools, an area in which her family happens to have significant investments... You have to give extra attention to the people who actually appear capable of getting a load of terrible things done, like Scott Pruitt of the Environmental Protection Agency. “The problem is that Pruitt knows what he’s doing,”.. [Budget Director Mick] Mulvaney by a nose.” You may remember that when Mulvaney introduced his first budget, observers discovered he had counted the same $2 trillion twice... Jeff Sessions. (“Racist on voting rights and more, bringing back mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, promoting the cancer of private prisons.”)
How Worried Should Jared Kushner Be?
Kushner then met with Sergey Gorkov, the head of Vnesheconombank, a Russian bank, later that month, reportedly at Kislyak’s request. The bank is the subject of U.S. sanctions that were placed on Russia in 2014, after its invasion of Ukraine. Perhaps more concerning, Gorkov is also a graduate of Russia’s Academy of the Federal Security Service, which trains the country’s spies.
.. Kushner then met with Sergey Gorkov, the head of Vnesheconombank, a Russian bank, later that month, reportedly at Kislyak’s request. The bank is the subject of U.S. sanctions that were placed on Russia in 2014, after its invasion of Ukraine. Perhaps more concerning, Gorkov is also a graduate of Russia’s Academy of the Federal Security Service, which trains the country’s spies.
.. “The fact that Kushner hasn’t been contacted now, let’s assume it’s true,” the source close to Comey said. “It’s either meaningless with respect to culpability or, pointing to the riskier side, the more likely that he’s implicated, because the people you’re really suspicious of you don’t really interview until later.”
.. The Times reported that Kushner, along with Vice-President Mike Pence and the White House counsel, Don McGahn, “generally backed dismissing Mr. Comey.” In another report, the paper noted that Kushner specifically “had urged Mr. Trump to fire Mr. Comey.”
.. But there was one dissenter: Kushner, who was “urging the president to counterattack.”
.. it wasn’t just Trump who had a conflict of interest when deciding on whether to fire Comey. Trump’s conflict is clear: his former national-security adviser (Flynn), former campaign manager (Paul Manafort), former foreign-policy adviser (Carter Page), and former political adviser (Roger Stone), are all reportedly being investigated by the F.B.I.. But less has been said about Kushner’s conflict. Should Kushner, who we now know is under some level of scrutiny by the F.B.I., be advising his father-in-law to fire the F.B.I. director and “counterattack” the special counsel?