We have no idea if her abrupt decision was somehow connected to her ethics woes. But they are substantial, and she departs with her once-spotless reputation badly tarnished. As our watchdog group has documented, Haley has, over the course of her tenure in the Trump administration, exemplified the ethical problems that have afflicted it from the president on down. Indeed, her resignation became public a day after we filed our latest of several complaints against her,
.. a disregard for our most basic ethics laws — in her case, ethics regulations governing gifts to officials and the Hatch Act limiting her political activity.
.. Haley accepted flights on private planes likely worth tens of thousands of dollars from several businesspeople who had supported her past campaigns, which could violate ethics rules and standards. In doing so, she risked creating at least the appearance that she sold access to the highest level of American foreign policy to businesses that had donated to her campaign for governor. Like Pruitt’s notorious luxury condo rental that he priced at $50 a night, far below market rates, Haley reported the value of her flights on these private jets at only hundreds of dollars apiece. That strains credulity when flights on private jets routinely cost far more.
.. many of her flights were on aircraft owned by the donors’ companies, and it is unclear whether the executives repaid the companies for the full value of the flights.
.. Haley’s obsequious performance during her resignation announcement underscored this president’s complete personal sway over his administration. She entered the job as a former adversary of Trump’s, and she showed an independent streak while serving. That was not in evidence as she praised the president, sang the unseen “genius” of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and declared that “the U.S. is respected.” The president’s disdain for ethical values, which Haley has regrettably emulated, has helped make the opposite true.
Nikki Haley to Resign as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations
Ms. Haley said she had been a “lucky girl” to have served in the government and said she was proud of her tenure. She singled out White House officials Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, the president’s son-in-law and daughter, for praise.
Ms. Haley was a frequent critic of Mr. Trump during the 2016 campaign and had endorsed two of his primary opponents, Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas.
She clashed with the White House last spring after saying the Trump administration would imminently impose new sanctions against Russia over its support for the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. When White House officials later said she spoke prematurely, she issued a sharp retort: “With all due respect, I don’t get confused,” she said.
Her resignation sent shock waves through the diplomatic community at the U.N., where she was seen as a fierce advocate for Mr. Trump’s views. The news stunned diplomats and U.N. officials who said they didn’t see it coming.
U.N. officials said that Ms. Haley hadn’t informed Secretary-General António Guterres in advance of her decision to depart.
.. The ambassadorial post has sometimes been a springboard for U.S. ambassadors with higher ambitions.
‘Winter is coming’: Allies fear Trump isn’t prepared for gathering legal storm
President Trump’s advisers and allies are increasingly worried that he has neither the staff nor the strategy to protect himself from a possible Democratic takeover of the House, which would empower the opposition party to shower the administration with subpoenas or even pursue impeachment charges
.. The president and some of his advisers have discussed possibly adding veteran defense attorney Abbe Lowell, who currently represents Trump son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, to Trump’s personal legal team
..Trump announced Wednesday that
- Donald McGahn will depart as White House counsel this fall, once the Senate confirms Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh. Three of McGahn’s deputies —
- Greg Katsas,
- Uttam Dhillon and
- Makan Delrahim — have departed, and a fourth,
- Stefan Passantino, will have his last day Friday.
That leaves John Eisenberg, who handles national security, as the lone deputy counsel.
.. McGahn and other aides have invoked the prospect of impeachment to persuade the president not to take actions or behave in ways that they believe would hurt him, officials said.
.. Trump has told confidants that some of his aides have highly competent lawyers such as Lowell, who represents Kushner, and William A. Burck, who represents McGahn as well as former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon.“He wonders why he doesn’t have lawyers like that,” said one person who has discussed the matter with Trump.Another adviser said Trump remarked this year, “I need a lawyer like Abbe.”Giuliani said that he has not heard of Trump considering adding Lowell to the team but that he would be a great choice because of his thorough and aggressive style.“This president might like that better,” Giuliani said. “If he thinks someone isn’t being tough enough, he has a tendency to go out to defend himself. And that’s not good.”
.. “I would think that the type of lawyer most able to handle the impeachment scenario would be someone from the appellate and Supreme Court bar — someone of the Ted Olson or Paul Clement or Andy Pincus level, someone who knows how to make the kind of arguments should it come to a vote in the Senate,” Corallo said.
.. Emmet Flood, a White House lawyer and McGahn ally who handles the special counsel’s Russia investigation, has long been considered a top prospect to replace McGahn.
.. Flood, often described as a lawyer’s lawyer, is in many ways the opposite of Trump and Giuliani, yet the president has told advisers he is impressed by Flood’s legal chops and hard-line positions defending the prerogatives of the White House.
.. White House aides, including deputy chief of staff Johnny DeStefano and political director Bill Stepien, have tried to ratchet down Trump’s expectations for the elections, saying that projections look grim in the House.
.. Another concern is that the White House, which already has struggled in attracting top-caliber talent to staff positions, could face an exodus if Democrats take over the House, because aides fear their mere proximity to the president could place them in legal limbo and possibly result in hefty lawyers’ fees.
“It stops good people from potentially serving because nobody wants to inherit a $400,000 legal bill,” said another Trump adviser.
.. the West Wing staff is barely equipped to handle basic crisis communications functions, such as distributing robust talking points to key surrogates, and question how the operation could handle an impeachment trial or other potential battles.
Trump sees the administration as having a singular focus — him — and therefore is less concerned with the institution of the presidency and not aware of the vast infrastructure often required to protect it, according to some of his allies.
.. Jack Quinn, who served as White House counsel under Clinton, said his office had at least 40 lawyers and as many as 60 during key times.
.. “I appreciate that Rudy Giuliani is doing a lot of the public speaking and perhaps some other things,” Quinn said. But, he added, “it’s a little bit of a mystery to me who is doing the outside legal work.”
No, Jared Kushner, it was not okay to delete my journalists’ work
I was editor in chief of the New York Observer when he allegedly had stories removed from the digital archive in secret. That would be a page out of his father-in-law’s ‘fake news’ book.
Delegitimizing the media is an authoritarian’s signature, and Trump does it intentionally with this kind of malicious, dangerous labeling. His favorite longer-running appellation for journalism that is inconvenient is “fake news” — which is rich, coming from a man whose material success of the past two decades was a reality show on which he pretended to fire people who were not working for him and insisted the drama was real. This is part of who he is: an incorrigible liar who believes he can bend reality to his will simply by insisting loudly and repeatedly things are not what they are.
.. I learned a few months ago his son-in-law, for whom I worked as editor in chief of the New York Observer in 2011 and 2012, is as willing to undermine the work of journalists seeking to publish the truth as Trump is. I have written about what Jared Kushner was like to work for as a businessman, but I had an unexpected coda to my time there a few months ago when a technologist I had worked with confessed to me Kushner had asked him to delete stories that were unflattering to his friends and that he had done it.
.. He could have tried to talk to me about why he objected to the stories, which is a conversation media owners and editors have on occasion at nearly all publications, but he did not.
.. To be clear, the stories were published, initially — some of them in print, and all of them on the Web. The impetus behind deleting them after the fact was to erase the digital trail of the hard work the journalists had done, to undo the factual reality of what they had reported, as far as the public record was concerned.
.. the stories were deleted long enough after publication that the journalists and their editors — including me — would not miss them.
.. There are a number of other technical reasons you might not be able to find a story in the archive, but one that would never occur to any rational journalist, or even any reasonable person, is your boss, the owner of the paper, is stealthily destroying your work and damaging the credibility of his own media publication in the process. Even in the annals of terrible media owners, this is something that would normally be credible only to a conspiracy theorist.
.. If any of us had known our work was being deleted after publication, I am fairly certain there would have been a raft of resignations.
.. what appears to be Trump family values: an active hostility to real journalism, which, if done correctly, is almost always inconvenient for people in power, and a willingness to use deceit to thwart it.