President Trump Is Asked to Show His Cards

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/02/opinion/donald-trump-government-ethics.html

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Late on Friday, the Office of Government Ethics sent a little-noticed memo to the White House, with the subject, “Data Call for Certain Waivers and Authorizations.” It could have been titled: “You Said You’d Clean Up Government. Now Prove It.”

On the campaign trail and in office, President Trump proclaimed his determination to keep his administration free of lobbyists, foreign agents and special interests, who have “reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost,” as he said in his inaugural address.

A week later, Mr. Trump signed an executive order requiring executive branch employees to obey a list of rules designed to prevent conflicts of interest. But the order is rendered practically worthless by a clause allowing waivers to ethical rules for any White House staff, without any written explanation or public disclosure. That’s why the ethics office, which ensures that public servants enter government free from potential conflicts of interest, is demanding that the White House provide the names of executive branch officials who have received waivers, on what issues, by June 1.

The Obama administration required that waivers to its anti-lobbying rules be accompanied by a detailed explanation written by administration ethics lawyers, and filed with the ethics office. In 2009, Republican Senator Charles Grassley, a veteran Senate investigator, demanded that the ethics office release the waivers. “The American people deserve a full accounting of all waivers and recusals to better understand who is running the government and whether the administration is adhering to its promise to be open, transparent, and accountable,” Mr. Grassley wrote.

Now, in the absence of any action from Congress, the government ethics office is on its own with a White House that openly flouts ethical norms. Top-tier government and regulatory positions have gone to friends of Wall Street, Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Pharma and for-profit education. Ivanka Trump, a White House senior adviser, reaps trademarks and promotional opportunities from China and Germany. Jared Kushner, Ms. Trump’s spouse, is a United States envoy to countries where his family has business ties. But why should anyone in the White House bother to separate business and government service when the president himself promotes everything from his Washington hotel to his private Mar-a-Lago beach club.

Presiding over this ethical morass is Stefan Passantino, the White House ethics officer. Mr. Passantino is a lawyer who has represented former House Speakers Dennis Hastert and Newt Gingrich in their ethical tangles. In 2009, when the Obama administration was criticized for granting a waiver so William Lynn, a former Raytheon lobbyist, could become deputy defense secretary, Mr. Passantino seemed to take the wrong lesson about the disclosure. “Very often in Washington and in politics there are efforts to make grand pronouncements reflecting a grand change in policy,” he said. The results, he added, are “the law of good intentions running headlong into the law of unintended consequences.”

It seems unlikely that good intentions have anything to do with Mr. Trump’s grand ethics pronouncements. It’s Mr. Passantino’s job to release to the ethics office, and to the public, the names of public servants whom Mr. Trump has allowed to bypass the rules. If he stonewalls, we look again to Republicans like Mr. Grassley, now chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, to remind this administration that the American people deserve an accountable government, and to make sure they get it.