美国国家公共电台 NPR Exiting Ethics Chief Walter Shaub Calls Trump White House 'A Disappointment'

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

This week, the director of the Office of Government Ethics 1 resigned. Walter Shaub Jr., who has tangled 2 with the Trump 3 administration over potential conflicts of interest, said, there isn't more I could accomplish. And he took a job with the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center. He joins us now. Mr. Shaub, welcome to the program.

WALTER SHAUB JR.: Thank you.

SIEGEL: When you say there isn't more you could accomplish, do you mean you've gained as much compliance 4 with ethics rules as the law guarantees, or the Trump administration just won't comply with the law no matter what you do?

SHAUB JR.: I've made as much of a difference as I can in this job. I don't think there's more that I can do. And I've done what I can to call attention to the things that concern me...

SIEGEL: Yeah.

SHAUB JR.: ...And have used the only resource available to me, which is to just be very public about those concerns.

SIEGEL: Do you wish you could do more?

SHAUB JR.: Yeah, I do, and I think the laws need to be changed, to be strengthened.

SIEGEL: Is Donald Trump or his family profiting from his position as president?

SHAUB JR.: Well, I think the real problem is that there's no way to know. There's no way to know what decisions he's making. Are they motivated by his own financial interests? Are they motivated by his policy goals? And in the past, presidents have resolved conflicts of interest by getting rid of their assets. The mere 5 fact that he holds them means there's a question mark over almost everything he does, including the decision to frequently go to his own properties, which gives them free advertisements. So...

SIEGEL: You would find those visits violations 7 of government ethics.

SHAUB JR.: No, and this is sort of a nuanced point that I need to make, and that's that the laws don't apply to the president. The decision by Congress to exclude the president from the primary conflict of interest law was one of necessity because we can't have the president recusing, not participating in matters where we need a president to participate.

But it wasn't a decision that the president's above the law and shouldn't do the same things that the people who work for him have to do. It's a decision of pragmatic necessity. We need him available. And all of our past presidents for the past four decades have understood that it's not a free pass, that it's a matter of necessity. And so they need to do what they can to act as though the laws apply.

SIEGEL: The General Services Administration ruled that Donald Trump's stake in a hotel that's a few blocks from the White House did not violate a lease that expressly excludes elected officials. Did the GSA in that case fail to enforce an obvious ethics violation 6?

SHAUB JR.: So I am not an expert in government contracting law. To me, I think the language is concerning. It says an elected official shall not partake in the contract. What my point is, though, is we wouldn't even have to be asking that question if he had divested 8 his interest in that hotel.

SIEGEL: Yeah, yeah. But it's a reminder 9 as well that the office you directed, the Office of Government Ethics, has a fairly narrow - pretty narrow brief. That is, a case like that, we don't go to your office to appeal the decision of the General Services Administration.

SHAUB JR.: That's right. We don't have enforcement power. One of the features of the existing ethics program that has worked for the past four decades - and I don't believe it's working now - is that there's a compliance structure where we have a limited set of rules that set the bare minimum. And if you violate them, you're either a rule violator or a criminal depending on the nature of the rule you violated.

But we ought to be able to hold government officials to a higher standard than saying, well, at least they're not criminals. And in that vein 10, the ethics program has always had a set of traditions and norms as to what people are going to do even when we're not talking strictly 11 about violations. We're talking about abandoning the norms and ethical 12 traditions of the executive branch that have made our ethics program the gold standard in the world until now.

SIEGEL: Well, given that you had experience with the George W. Bush administration and then the Obama administration when you became director, is the behavior of this White House dramatically different from those two White Houses?

SHAUB JR.: I have only good things to say about the ethics program that President Bush ran as well as the ethics program that President Obama ran in the past two administrations. Both were incredibly supportive of the ethics program, and they proved that ethics is not a partisan 13 issue.

I can only describe my experience with the way they've run their ethics program in the White House right now as one of disappointment, which pretty much reached its peak when I finally got my hands on the waivers they've been issuing and discovered that they were unsigned, undated. One was explicitly 14 retroactive. Most of the rest of the ones are implicitly 15 retroactive. And that's just no way to run an ethics program.

SIEGEL: I mean these are waivers to presidential appointees saying, you don't have to file, or you don't have to comply with ethics rules.

SHAUB JR.: Not file but comply, yes.

SIEGEL: Comply - when Donald Trump was elected, you famously unfurnished your office, ready to vacate it at a moment's notice. Did you ever feel deterred 16 by the threat of being dismissed?

SHAUB JR.: No. And in fact the reason I took things out of my office was to remind myself not to be attached to that office and not to be afraid to take stands that I needed to take.

SIEGEL: Walter Shaub, outgoing director of the Office of Government Ethics, thanks for talking with us.

SHAUB JR.: Thanks. Thanks for having me.