How Trump Broke the Office of Government Ethics; New Yorker, July 14, 2017

Ryan Lizza, New Yorker; How Trump Broke the Office of Government Ethics

"While many Administration officials took Shaub’s advice, Trump’s refusal to voluntarily adhere to traditional conflict-of-interest rules, and Shaub’s repeated fights with the White House over ethics agreements and transparency, convinced Shaub that Trump was trampling the norms that the last several Administrations voluntarily maintained. “With the White House appointees and other things the White House has been involved in, they stripped all the meat off those bones and it’s just the skeleton,” he said.

In Shaub’s experience, most of the time he could convince reluctant officials in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama Administrations to take actions that went beyond statutes by appealing to their sense of ethics, going to their superiors, or, in extreme circumstances, going to the press.

“It’s been a very nuanced art that is based more on persuasion than actual legal authority,” he said, “but there were so many times that I could call up the Bush or Obama White House and I could say, ‘This just isn’t working,’ or ‘These guys won’t do what I say,’ and they would intervene and break the logjam and usually come down on my side and push people to do things.”

With the Trump Administration, it has been different. “I don’t have that in this Administration. And I guess what is being exposed is the emperor has no clothes,” Shaub told me. “To have O.G.E. criticize you would have been a career-ender in the olden days—now it’s just lost in the noise.”

The depressing lesson Shaub learned is that in the Trump era, with a politically polarized electorate and media, the shaming effect of the government’s top ethics watchdog going public no longer had the same impact. Shaub used Twitter, a press conference, and an extremely transparent foia policy to shame the White House on several major issues, but he rarely convinced Trump and his top White House aides to do more than the bare minimum. And as the Administration has done on so many other occasions, it vehemently denied that it was doing anything wrong.

It didn’t break the ethics laws—it broke the ethical norms."