Walter Shaub’s Brave, Quixotic Ethics Battle with Trump; New Yorker, July 7, 2017

Sheelah Kolhatkar, New Yorker; Walter Shaub’s Brave, Quixotic Ethics Battle with Trump

"After leaving his post at the O.G.E., Shaub will join the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan organization based in Washington, D.C., as the director of its ethics program. According to Lawrence Noble, the Center’s general counsel, Shaub learned about the job opening only recently. “When the opportunity came for us to hire Walt, we couldn’t pass it up,” Noble said. He added that, to the best of his knowledge, Shaub “was under no outside pressure” to leave the O.G.E. before his term ended, and Shaub told the Washington Post much the same.

In his new role, Shaub will be helping the Center to expand its ethics program, strengthen its watchdog role, and help design potential fortifications to the ethics rules, which have been “stress-tested” under President Trump, as Noble put it. He added that Trump had exposed many weaknesses in ethics laws. With Shaub’s help, his organization will be looking at ways to strengthen and update conflict-of-interest rules for the President specifically, as well as ways to potentially give more power to the O.G.E., which, currently, can only offer advice and suggestions and has no enforcement role."