Etiqueta: white house ethics waivers

Trump Exempts Entire Senior Staff From White House Ethics Rules

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After a pointed exchange with ethics officials, the White House has released a list of waivers to Trump’s ethics rules—and Kellyanne Conway, Steve Bannon, and more are exempted.

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY LYNE LUCIEN/THE DAILY BEAST

LACHLAN MARKAY
05.31.17 10:55 PM ET

President Donald Trump has exempted his entire senior staff from provisions of his own ethics rules to allow them to work with political and advocacy groups that support the administration.

Staffers given a pass on those rules include White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, who has the green light to communicate and meet with “political, advocacy, trade, or non-profit organizations” that formerly employed her consulting firm, despite ethics rules that would otherwise bar work with former clients.

Chief White House strategist Steve Bannon also received a waiver to the rules as part of a blanket exemption for all White House appointees allowing them to communicate with the press. His reported discussions with former colleagues at the pro-Trump site Breitbart News, which Bannon chaired until last year, had raised red flags among ethics watchdogs.

Bannon and Conway will both be free to work with a network of political groups backed by the wealthy Mercer family, which was integral to Trump’s victory last year and continues to support his agenda as president.

The White House on Wednesday released a list of waivers to the ethics pledge imposed by a January executive order on all administration nominees and appointees. It agreed to do so only after a pointed exchange with federal ethics officials over the scope of their oversight authority.

Three former lobbyists in the White House, and one on the vice president’s staff, have also been exempted from “revolving door” rules imposed by that executive order, allowing them to work on administration policies that might benefit former clients.

The list provides the first official glimpse at the extent to which Trump has circumvented his own ethics rules by hiring former special interest advocates of the type that he railed against on the campaign trail.

But it does not cover the entire Trump administration and only discloses waivers granted to officials in the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President. The Office of Government Ethics had requested all waivers issued to appointees administration-wide, but it was not immediately clear whether those were to be made available by the White House or the applicable federal agencies.

The White House did not immediately respond to questions about further waiver disclosures.

The West Wing’s three former lobbyists have been given wide latitude to work on a range of policy issues that might dovetail with the interests of their former clients.

Energy policy adviser Michael Catanzaro—a former energy industry lobbyist with clients in the oil, gas, and coal sectors—“may participate in broad policy matters and particular matters of general applicability relating to the Clean Power Plan” and other Obama administration environmental rules.

“Particular matters of general applicability” generally refer to laws or regulations that affect a narrow and identifiable group—say, a single industry. In effect, Catanzaro will be free to promote policies that benefit his former clients as long as he doesn’t go to bat for them directly.

So too will Shahira Knight, a White House economist and former lobbyist for financial services giant Fidelity who can now “participate in broad policy matters and particular matters of general applicability relating to tax, retirement and financial services issues.”

Andrew Olmem, another White House economist and a former lobbyist for a host of large financial services and insurance firms, will be free to work with former clients on specific issues affecting bank capital requirements, financial regulation of insurers, and the Puerto Rican debt crisis, all issues on which he has recently lobbied.

Those officials have been given freer rein to advance their former clients’ financial interests, but ethics rules have also been waived for every other “commissioned officer”—staffers who report directly to the president—in the White House who has worked for a political group in the past two years.

That will allow a number of White House staffers to collaborate with pro-Trump advocacy operations. The West Wing is stacked with officials who have made significant sums working, consulting for, or representing high-profile political organizations, including networks of groups financed by the Trump-backing Mercer family and the libertarian Koch family.

Conway herself consulted for more than 50 political, policy, and advocacy organizations last year, according to a White House financial disclosure statement.

She and Bannon will be free to continue working with two campaign vendors in particular, Glittering Steel and Cambridge Analytica, that are key components of the Mercers’ pro-Trump political endeavors. Bannon helped lead both companies, and Cambridge Analytica enlisted Conway’s consulting services last year.

The White House also issued a collective waiver to six White House officials formerly employed by the law firm Jones Day, which has sent more than a dozen attorneys to the Trump administration, allowing them to meet and communicate with former colleagues representing the White House, Trump, his campaign, “or political entities supporting the president.”

The White House’s waiver disclosures came after a tense back and forth with the Office of Government Ethics. The White House initially disputed that OGE had the authority to demand a full list of waivers granted to administration appointees.

After OGE director Walter Shaub disputed those “highly unusual” claims, the White House agreed to disclose all ethics pledge waivers.

Disclosure was more regimented under a similar executive order imposed by President Barack Obama in 2009. That measure directed OGE to regularly update its website with a list of waivers to a similar ethics pledge—Obama granted 49 in total over eight years and across his entire administration—along with detailed explanations of why those waivers were in the “public interest.” No such explanations accompanied the Trump White House’s list.
Ethics watchdogs appeared nonplussed by the release on Wednesday evening.

“We now know who was given a waiver from their WH ethics pledge,” wrote the left-leaning group Citizens for Responsibility in Washington on Twitter. “Looks like the end of the drain the swamp illusion.”

In: dailybeast

White House Waivers May Have Violated Ethics Rules

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Stephen K. Bannon, center, President Trump’s chief strategist, in April. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times

The Trump administration may have skirted federal ethics rules by retroactively granting a blanket exemption that allows Stephen K. Bannon, the senior White House strategist, to communicate with editors at Breitbart News, where he was recently an executive.

The exemption, made public late Wednesday along with more than a dozen other ethics waivers issued by the White House, allows all White House aides to communicate with news organizations, even if they involve a “former employer or former client.”

The waiver, which was undated, did not mention Mr. Bannon specifically, but appeared to benefit him by potentially dislodging him from a pending ethics complaint over his past discussions with Breitbart editors. It would also free him from restrictions on his future communication with the conservative media company.

The waiver, and the fact that it remains unclear when it was originally issued, seemed unusual to Walter M. Shaub Jr., the director of the Office of Government Ethics, who questioned its validity.

“There is no such thing as a retroactive waiver,” Mr. Shaub said in an interview. “If you need a retroactive waiver, you have violated a rule.”

A spokeswoman for the White House did not respond to a request for comment. The ethics waivers had prompted a dispute between the White House and the ethics office, which pressed the administration to make them public. The waivers reveal what past work might conflict with aides’ new official duties.

In January, President Trump signed an executive order that put in place stringent ethics rules for his political appointees like Mr. Bannon. Under the policy, Mr. Bannon would be barred from contacting Breitbart employees for two years to discuss issues that were under his purview while he was an executive there.

But Mr. Bannon continued those communications, including with Breitbart editors, after beginning his job as Mr. Trump’s chief strategist on Jan. 20, according to a complaint by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal group.

Some critics have raised concerns about Mr. Bannon’s ties to Breitbart, which he helped build into a formidable conservative media force before leaving last August to join Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign. The complaint alleged that Mr. Bannon’s discussions with the media organization — in his official role as chief strategist — “resulted in Breitbart receiving preferential access to senior members of the Trump administration.”

The complaint was filed with the White House Counsel’s Office, which has the ability to investigate and issue a punishment, if it deems one necessary. It has not commented publicly on the complaint.

But in another recent case, after complaints from several groups, the counsel’s office disclosed that it found that another top adviser, Kellyanne Conway, had acted “inadvertently” by promoting the brand of Ivanka Trump, Mr. Trump’s daughter, during an interview on Fox News in February. It said Ms. Conway was “highly unlikely” to err again.

The Office of Government Ethics, which is the chief ethics monitor for the federal government, does not have the authority to investigate complaints. It did issue an opinion during the Obama administration maintaining that retroactive ethics waivers were not allowed, and noted several instances where they appeared to have been granted after the fact.

“Waivers and authorizations must be issued prospectively in order to be valid,” Don Fox, the general counsel of the ethics office, wrote in April 2010. He wrote that the process of evaluating waivers was one of the more significant duties of ethics officials. “Both the individual employee’s interests and those of the government are best served when this process is carried out in a careful and consistent manner.”

Mr. Shaub, the ethics monitor, said he was concerned that the media organization waiver, and a number of others made public on Wednesday, did not include dates, making it impossible to tell when they were issued.

“It leaves us unable to evaluate if the waiver was issued before or after you engaged in conduct that would otherwise be prohibited,” Mr. Shaub said.

For example, there is no date on a broad waiver allowing senior White House employees to have contacts with an assortment of political organizations — including ones where they may have worked, such as the president’s campaign or the Republican Attorneys General Association.

Richard W. Painter, a White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, who has been critical of the Trump administration’s approach to ethics, said that backdating was not an acceptable approach.

“The only retroactive waiver I have ever heard of is called a pardon,” Mr. Painter said in an email.

In: nytimes