Transcripts For CSPAN Government Ethics Trump Administration 20180124

Particularly good moment to have this discussion. The Brennan Center, for those of you who do not know, is a nonpartisan law and policy institute that seeks to improve our broken systems of justice d democrac and we ke t use the tools of advocacy, strategic negotiations to do just that. We work on what we think are very cutting edge issues, such as voting rights, money in politics, ethics, criminal justice reform, racial justice, fair courts, and a host of other issues to, again, do just that, make our democracy and justice systems stronger and more effective for all americans. Please follow the Brennan Center if you dont already on facebook and twitter. Be sure to check out our videos and podcasts on itunes, youtube, and in the multimedia section of brennancenter. Org. And with that said, i am pleased to introduce our moderator for todays program, kimberly atkins, who is the chief washington reporter and columnist for the boston herald. Please join me in welcoming kimberly. [applause] kimberly thank you, nicole. Thank you so much, nicole. President Donald Trumps decision to keep control of his Business Empire despite apparent conflicts of interest is but one of a number of ethical controversies that have made headlines since Inauguration Day one year ago. As informal guardrails that constrain selfdealing by those in power fall by the wayside, what can be done to shore up federal ethics laws to give the Public Confidence that their leaders will put the interest of the American People first . What are the most significant gaps that exist in our system of federal ethics regulation . What are the special challenges that accompany any effort to regulate the president s conduct in office, and what are the most promising ideas for reform . Those are the questions that we are going to be tackling today with our esteemed panel of guests, including kathleen clark, professor of law at the Washington University school of law, walter shaub, the ethics director at the Campaign Legal center and former director of the office of government ethics, and daniel weiner, the senior counsel of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for justice and the nyu school of law. Welcome to the Brennan Center of justice here at nyud. C. Ok, and, again, my name is kimberly atkins, and i am a Political Columnist and reporter for the boston herald. I also wanted to note in the beginning that we will have time at the end for questions, so keep them and hold them tight, and we will get to them later, but i wanted to start out talking about the background of federal ethics laws and how they apply to the president. Well, that is a good question. The federal ethics laws affect the president , but one of the most important is the federal prohibition does not, and that exemption dates back to the late 1980s, although it was applied before. What is interesting, of course, and most folks know this, is that historically, president s notwithstanding that they were not prohibited from having conflicts of interest took steps, sometimes rather elaborate steps to avoid them nonetheless, and usually that took the form, and my copanelists will correct me if i am wrong, because they have worked in this space longer that i have, but limiting the types of assets they held, diversified mutual funds, make accounts, or placing other types of assets in a blind trust, which was really shielded from their control and their knowledge. So that was a key element of the federal ethics regime that does others involng bribery, have never really proven that because the president has never been prosecuted, but most of us would agree that president s can take bribes. There are significantly fewer constraints than for virtually any other federal official other than the Vice President. Kimberly ok, walter, talk about the rules in place along the way to complement and supplement. Walter with regard to the president . Kimberly with regard to the president , yes. Walter it is true that the president is not covered by the statute, but the live does not impose a criminal penalty for the president s conflict of interests, but that does not mean as a president asserted a little more than a year ago the president obviously can have a conflict of interest, anything that creates a financial interest that runs contrary to the duties of your position, and a president can certainly do that, and we have seen this president do that. It is not entirely true that no laws cover the president in regard to conflicts of interest we ethics in general. Technicahe president is covered by the ethics rules, although oge, the office of government ethics, has created an exception to allow the president to accept certain gifts. In the past year it became effective january 1, but it was issued as a final prior to that in 2016. It virtually created a new requirement that you should consider if you can accept a gift and should you accept it, and would it create a concern on the part of a reasonable person with knowledge of the relevant facts as to whether or not this would impede your impartiality in your decisionmaking or lead you to give greater access to someone. I do not suspect for a second that that is being applied, and it should be, and Good Government groups and reporters should be asking if they see him except a gift, what is your analysis in applying those factors . Another obscure provision that applies to the president is that in 2012, the president past an act, and it was somehow incorrectly reported that that law was rescinded. It has not been rescinded. One transparency portion was rolled back, but the law was originally a response to a 60 minutes piece that suggested members of congress were profiting by their position by engaging in trades around the time that ws are being passed and other decisions are being made, and it was initially intended to apply only to the legislative branch, and president obama called on congress, sort of shame to them in their state of the union speech that they should pass that. That prompted an action that they extended it to the executive branch. Yes, we will pass it, all right, and became like a Christmas Tree with people hanging ornaments on it, because there were over 30 amendments in the final weeks or so. What apply to employees applied to the president , and one of the restrictions was a requirement under a section to recuse from any particular matter affecting the finances of anyone you have an arrangement with for future employment or compensation or are negotiating for one of those, and that is interesting, because it imposes a recusal requirement on the president , and as we will discuss later, that has been the subject of some constitutional debate as to whether congress can impose this recusal on the president , but, in fact, they have. It just has not been challenged because nobody has tried to assert it. But that was the crossing of a threshold, and i do not know if they did it deliberately, and as with history, you have to assume they knew what they were doing. [laughter] kimberly what is missing, some of the loopholes . Can you give us an overview of that . Kathleen i just want to emphasize that the countrys first conflict of interest law does apply to the president , and these are found in the United States constitution, the foreign emoluments clause and the domestic emoluments clause. Any official is prevented from accepting something of value from a foreign government, and that, of course, has been the subject of some litigation, but what i think that represents is that our framers recognized the danger that Government Officials, including the president , could be influenced by money or anything of value that they received. Now, in terms of exceptions, problems that need to be filled, i think what was identified, in 1989, congress amended this criminal financial conflict of interest statute so that it exempted the president and the Vice President from its reach. I believe that was a mistake, and i think if we go back a couple more decades, back to 1962, when president kennedy was submitting comprehensive Ethics Reforms before congress, president kennedy included in that an exception for the president and the Vice President , and congress rejected it and from 1962 on imposed it on the president and the five president the financial statute. I think when we get a congress that cares again about our founding principles and that conflicts of interest and protecting the public trust, when we get that congress, i think that Congress Needs to reenact this financial criminal conflict of interest provision on the president. The other thing i want to mention is it is another problem in the conflict of interest standards or ethics standards. This is a process. Highlevel officials are required by statute to fill out somewhat detailed forms about their financial interests, but the statute has been interpreted so that if a Government Official has a company, a business, the official does not need to disclose the debt and Financial Relationships of that company. We have a president who, of course, has hundreds of llcs, and the office of government ethics had to interpret the statute, the disclosure statute. He is not required to disclose the relationship, including the debt load of those llcs, those companies, so the Financial Disclosure laws are probably adequate for many people in the room, someone like myself of modest means, but they are not adequate to deal with someone who is using has their own companies, because it has been interpreted not to require disclosures, so someone like trump, for someone might Jared Kushner, we have to change the laws so we can get visibility into the Financial Connections and the debt. In addition to them not having that, the other thing lacking about disclosure, ethics disclosure, if you ever see they disclose these in very broad ranges, like 5 million to 20 million. Just to see what your asset is, that may be adequate, but one of the things we have looked at is if you look at other countries, saint italy under silvio berlusconi, he was not necessarily directly taking Government Action to benefit his media empire, although he was. But there is also a pattern of seeking businesses and sectors of industry buying advertising at inflated prices at his companies and increasing their value, and that was actually a primary way he in which to himself off of being Prime Minister of italy. We have seen that somewhat with the husband and wife president of argentina who actually own a chain of hotels, so when you have these broad ranges, it obscures the extent to which certain assets may be increased in value for other reasons than just the market. Maralago made 7 million more during the most recent period that it did before the president became president. He actually disclosed that on his report, but that is a good example. Maybe maralago is a more attractive place to play and be a member now that it is with the president of the United States. That is something that the forms would not necessarily reveal right now. Kimberly i want to step back and really posed to the panel, why should we care about these issues . Why do we care about conflicts of interest . I know there are a lot of supporters of the president who say he is a good businessman. He has a right to make money. We knew he was a businessman when he was elected. So why do we have these confident of interest laws, and why we have these conflict of interest laws and why do we care about them . If i can do that and go back to some points we just covered. Kathleen knows she and i disagree on one, but it a cheerful disagreement. I do not think it is a matter of going back to what it was prior to the 1989 amendment. I think it was understood at the time that the criminal statute did not apply to the president , and, of course, in 1974, writing on behalf of the Justice Department, they wrote articulating that, and oge cited that opinion again, so i think by 1989 when they put that in there, i think there was some nervousness at the tail end of the Reagan Administration about consequences for some alleged issues, but i dont think anybody seriously thought at the time that they were changing the law. I think they thought they were codifying it. In terms of liabilities for companies, i am the one who certifies the president s Financial Disclosure, and i think it is compliant for what he disclosed. Now, if it turns out there are things he did not disclosed, that is different. I agree with the other two panelists that the law is inadequate. Dealing with the situation were in in terms of disclosure, i think oges treatment of companies, saying you do not have to disclose their liabilities or Business Partners is consistent with the rest of the application of the statute, because if, for instance, if you hold stock in cocacola or exxon or any other large, publicly traded company, you are not nessarily gog to know as just a random person who called up your broker and said buy five shares of cocacola that you know who their affiliates are, so i think this is about companies and more specifically rightly held family companies, like President Trumps family companies, Jared Kushners family companies, and a head of commerce coming from accuweather, which is a very closely held family company, so i think this is a new problem that we have not had a lot of experience dealing with, and the law has not caught up with the fact that now we have got Public Officials with these privately Held Companies, and then in terms of the ranges, again, i tend to look at it as a technician. I am not sure i would agree that we need to break the ranges into more pieces, particularly on the value side, because if you have a one dollar asset, it is still a conflict of interest unless there is an exemption that applies. It might be more important on the income side. So if you see a greatly increased revenue stream, i think that might be more indicative. I take your point. That is may be less important. And i think if we strip out publicly traded companies i do not know about knowing that, but these privately Held Companies, we want to know what that is about. But all of this goes back to why does this matter, and it is at its most basic core about corruption, whether or not somebody is misusing or abusing the authority entrusted to them for their own personal gain or the gain of some other private individual or company, and if we have people going into government to enrich themselves or enrich others by using governmental authority, and i am not talking about collecting your salary but using Government Authority that is entrusted to you by the people to be used for their benefit, but you used that authority for your own benefit, then that calls into question the legitimacy of governme as a concept, much less the individual case, and that is the hallmark of the countries that we labeled banana republics or things, where the leaders can just help themselves. There are rumors that putin used his power to become one of the richest men in the world. You have to ask yourself. But even beyond the actual misuse is these civilized, modern, western society, the sense that we should not even have to ask the question. The burden should be on the Government Official to take whatever actions they can to show us that there is no remaining conflict of interest, and that said, it should be, because the public cannot have access to enough information to know the link between a financial interest and a decision. It is very hard to draw. In many cases, we find ourselves highlighting the smaller violations that are the canary in the coal mine that tell us there is a broader issue going on. Eliminating conflicts of interests so that you can know that my decisions are based on the policies i declared when you voted for me rather than on my own personal enrichment or the personal enrichment of a third party. We have had president s have this happen up till now. He mentioned russia, and another example is venezuela. It is a basket place now, but it was a fairly stable and prosperous democracy for many years, and people think of chavez as doing that, but this was at the top before. There is speculation and a vast array of literature that documents the extent to which perception of selfdealing at the top undermine the public faith in democratic institution, and we are seeing that trend in reduced faith in democracy, and the United States is not immune to that. And just to continue the canary in the coal mine metaphor, ethics is to some extent indicative of a broader range of democratic concerns, because if you take some of the idea that the president cannot have a conflict of interest in the extreme, you get the idea that the president is with that of the state, and that takes you into a very different political philosophy than what our country was founded on, so i think this is important. If you worry about executive power, i do not want to be harping on the president s businesses, but i do not want him exceeding his authority. Kimberly i want to get to some solutions about reform, but before we get there, i will start with you, kathleen, what are the limits of ethics laws, and what is it set by . Is it by the constitution or Something Else . Kathleen the constitution, if we take a look at the foreign and domestic a emoluments clause is, the founders were concerned about conflicts, but it also helps ground us in something that dan was alluding to, the idea that our Government Officials are given power not so they can exercise it on behalf of themselves or their family members so they can exercise it on behalf of their mission of the Public Interest on behalf of all of us, so at the very heart of the matter is this i will use a legal term fiduciary, that officials have legal obligations to the people, which is foundational, and the government ethics standards that have been adopted by congress and then by regulators in enacting regulations and otherwise really are expressions of that notion that Public Office is a public trust, and so at the very heart of it, it is about Government Officials recognizing and acting as though they owe obligations to us, not just to themselves selfishly, and ethics regulations, as complicated as they can get, can be connected to this foundational principle that the Public Office is a public trust, and i want to acknowledge that it is not at all clear that this president will recognize this, that truth. I think he really is challenging that truth, and his challenge to it is consistent with his other antidemocratic tendencies that we have seen in attacking not just foundational principles like the public all this is a public trust but foundational protections for our democracy. It is all of one, it seems to me. I would like to make a pitch to people who like this president , because the next the next president may not be a billionaire real estate developer. It may be a lefty tech titan from silken valley or a media mogul. Those will apply to the individual. Many people like this president and that doesnt mean you shouldnt care about this stuff. President tends to forget that the next president may have a very different philosophy and they reject constraints on themselves that they might like for their successors. I think thats important to keep in mind. Going back to what kathleen was saying, goes back to the fundamental purpose for us being a country and having the government could the question becomes, do you serve the government or does the government serve you . If you serve the government and authoritarian country where the king or ruler rules all, it might make sense to misuse the criminal investigative apparatus of the state to go after your vanquished political rival and punish them for having dared run. Gainst you or if you live in the country by the government exists to serve you, maybe the criminal investigative apparatus is for looking for crimes that are a threat to you right now. Go beyond that make up the statute of limitations in some case. When they announced they are going to do offshore drilling and they put out a federal register notice even before the eriod closes, secretary zinke you exempt the one state in which the president s each front property exists, but everyone has to wait. It looks like this is for the benefit the state. We have come to a social contract where we are going to have a government to protect us in one way or another. Think as dan was emphasizing, the concept of the canary in the coal mine is very broad because this is an indication of in many ways a trend toward authoritarianism in the sense that this is for my benefit as your leader as opposed to i am acting out your wishes. Kimberly just a reminder, this is the Brennan Center for justice and we are talking to walter shaub, kathleen clark, professor of law from the Washington University school of law, and Daniel Wiener at the Brennan Center, and i am kimberly atkins. You can follow the Brennan Center for justice on facebook, twitter, and watch their programs on youtube and listen to itunes podcasts. All their reports and media are online at Brennan Center. Org. I want to talk a little bit about solutions or proposed reforms that you all have, but maybe kick it off first with walter explaining wh oge does and why it seems at least, from my perspective as a reporter, that it was developed largely to be selfgoverning, at least when it comes to the white house and is one of the proposals tougher Enforcement Mechanisms for oge or Something Else out of that . Walter the office of government ethics, which i lead until the summer, is a prevention tool plain and simple. That is what it is here to do. I dont view it as part of the enforcement mechanism. It is part of the prevention mechanism, so my discussion on where to go from there stems from that. People come to the office of government ethics, or to any of the 45 Agency Ethics officials that it oversees, and proactively asks for advice and we have nominees coming to oge opening up their financial an assets and answering very intrusive questions that go beyond what we need strictly for the form, in order to be sure that there is not anything we are missing that has to be addressed. And by and large, they tend to cooperate. And the prevention mechanism, you know, it is hard to quantify what has been prevented, because you are writing down what has not happened and i once said at the beginning of a speech that you dont hear much about ethics when things are ing well and that is precisely as it should be, but you dont see people knocking on the door of an Inspector General and saying, i am thinking about doing this thing. Will you investigate me and to see if i get thrown in jail if i do it . Nobody goes to the police man for advice proactively, so i think oge has a role in enforcement, which is correlated coordinating with the enforcement entities and delivering information that shows wrongdoing to them, but in terms of the interactive back and forth, i dont think you have that kind of interaction with the level of success that oge had for 40 years until this past year, if people are having to report themselves to the policeman to get advice. And so as a result, oges authorities are somewhat limited. I do not necessarily think conceptually that is a terrible thing. You have to remember that when i was the director, my immediate supervisor was the president and i point out to people, i once last year had to fill out a form and for the life of me i cant remember what it was come on but i had to write the name of my supervisor and i wrote donald j. Trump and i went back there to make sure that they did not think i was just being a smart alec. He was literally my supervisor. Thats important to understand and it vividly illustrates the limitations on oge because ultimately the things we are seeing and the departures that have occurred in the past year are the fault of congress that has refused to exercise the kind of oversight that you can be sure it would have exercised if if the other candidate had won. And ultimately, only congress is going to be able to impose consequences on a president. The president s employee is not going to be able to do that, and even if you gave them the authority to do it, he would just firehem before it became effective. We are already having to bite our nails hoping that Robert Mueller does not get fired and that is a criminal investigation and he has the power to charge somebody with the obstruction of justice. Theres no way anybody is talking about building an oge that is a special counsel like mueller, and if you did you are making a decision to throw away a prevention mechanism that has prevented a lot of harm. You have to look at the tradeoffs and i think there is temptation in a lot of ways to want an easy fix to a complex problem, but my experience in this world is that the world is very nuanced and complex and easy fixes do not work well for complex problems. And i think along the lines of something dan said, you know, he made the comment about congress and some of the same congressmen who have no interest in looking into anything going on now for asking questions and are still asking questions about what they call pay for play with a nonprofit but and by the way, that is a fair thing to look at but how do you have concerns about pay for play with a nonprofit when you have a forprofit with this president that is letting people pay for access to the president and not use the same terminology . And so, the lessons we learned in our civics classes in high school arent working out because congress is not serving as a check. Even when Robert Mueller is done, he is only going to release information that will either lead to somebody being convicted or is exculpatory in nature. He has a constitutional responsibility to share that with the defendant. But beyond that you will not get answers. What we do not have is a 9 11 Type Commission that is looking at all aspects of what happened in the last election to really dive in and tell us in detail or write a report like this that lays out everything they found that happened last year. That isnt happening because the constitutional check of congress overseeing the executive branch is not working when you have one party in charge of all of it. That is not that i am for one rty or against i will probably vote against any parthaving total control over ever again, even if it means voting against the candidate i like, but getting back to the fixes, the question becomes what do you want to fix . Do you throw away 40 years that seemed to work relatively well and had built upon itself and refined itself to the point where we were doing fine tuning rather than turning the bigger dial that moved the needle up and down, for those old enough to remember knobs on a radio [laughter] so the kinds of things i would like to see include and i shared 13 proposals and it will i wont go through all of them, but the kinds of things i would like to see and you hear that aboutagree on this panel some of the fixes, but one of the things i would like to see is, and i think it is in common with them, is increased protection for the director of the office of government ethics. When i made my stand last year, i was a guy that had student loans, no new job lined up, 19 years of federal service, one year short of the magic 20, and i thought it would be fired at 12 01 on january 20. So it was get a kick out of the white houses comments that i did this for a profit. It is like, i will trade shoes with you any day. But setting aside their deep, dark cynicism in comments like that, i do think it would be helpful if the director of oge, like others in government, like inspectors general or the head of the office of special counsel, which is not Robert Muellers office but the office that investigates whistleblower retaliations, could only be fired for cause and congress had to be given 30 days notice with a written a donation. Something as simple as that. A written explanation. Something as simple as that. Where i fought a battle the white house to get some records, oge has all the authority it needs to gather information and records about ethics, but none of the power. And the difference between authority and power is the authority for a judge to issue an order and the power is the ability to send marshals to your doorstep when you do not comply. Oge has plenty of authority, but no u. S. Marshals on hand. In terms of investigations, i do think that there is a gap in investigative authority, because there are dozens of small agencies that have no Inspector General. And you also have the white house among them that is outside the scope of an Inspector General, so the proposal i made is create one centralized Inspector General that covers all the entities in the executive branch, other than the whithouse, that dont have an Inspector General and give the ig full authority to investigate anything coming out of their the can and aat an ig special Ethics Authority to conduct an ethics investigation in the white house or anywhere else in the government for really highlevel officials upon referral from oge. And that also is a mechanism that prevents abuse, because you could suddenly empower oge to be an investigative body and one director is going to make decisions about what to investigate and you can have the Ethics Program become a Political Tool in that case, but having a separate ig who can only conduct a special investigation of the white house, upon referral to oge, it is like those old 1980s war movies with the two guys in the missile silo who have to turn the key at the same time from across the room. It means that two have to agree and they may have been appointed by different president s in many cases, so that gets protection. And the one other that i will cover briefly is my proposal for solving president ial conflict of interest. I dont think that a president should have to recuse because i do think that we need a president to participate in everything. We cant have a National Crisis unfolding with splitsecond decisions needing to be made and the president saying, can somebody check the file and see if i need to recuse from this and not participate . And theres nobody to give a waiver because he does not have a boss, but even if he did it is , turning over the power of the executive branch. I dont agree with those who say its a concert several constitutional problem because Congress Already has a limited circumstance, but i think it is a bad idea and dangerous in the sense that we need a president available for things, so i would like to get us back to the tradition where president s voluntarily take as many steps as humanly possible to resolve conflicts of interest voluntarily and one way that i and ip with to do this proposed it to congress was require them to disclose, in writing, to the office of government ethics their plan for addressing their conflict of interest and have oge post it. That is one piece of it, but the key piece is that it happened before the first primary to decide who is going to be a partys nominee, because the media failed to ask the questions last fall. They failed to ask Hillary Clinton what are you going to do with that foundation . They failed to Ask Donald Trump what are you going to do with all of these companies . Even if they had done that in the fall of 2016, i dont think there are very many people in world who e going to change parties over that. But if you start asking the question, when you had 16 people running for the same partys nomination on the stand, i suspect ted cruz or marco rubio or Chris Christie or jeb bush or john kasich or ben carson would have really thrown down with this president over his failure to come up with a plan to resolve conflicts of interest, and some people might have said, that bothers me so i will vote for this other guy who is going to run for my partys nomination and i do not to have to change parties. And so the idea is disclosure, but disclosure early enough. Then the final piece of it has to be you can and mended at any ite in writing and rerelease so it becomes a race to the top. You come in and bid to low the next cannot comes in and says i will be this much more. And you take a beating at a town hall or debate or something and come back and you rerelease in an even higher plan and then they compete. I wonder if that might create enough pressure to get us back to voluntary compliance with the vestig investiture rather than compelling recusal. The final thing i will say is something dan said about it cutting both ways. It cuts both ways in a bigger sense. If you like donald trump, you should be concerned that maybe somebody else will become president and keep their conflicts of interest,. Maybe Hillary Clinton will run again and keep her foundation and a few years ago you are chanting, lock her up, but now are living with it because he approved donald trump. There are a number of millionaires and billionaires toying with the idea of running and no matter which party that they run for, if they come in and refuse to resolve their conflicts of interest, then they have now sealed permanently in place the idea that a president doesnt ever have to worry about their conflicts of interest. And if they take advantage of the fact that they can say the other guy didnt do that, the other party didnt do that, but they come in and do it again, make no mistake they are part of the problem and not part of the solution. So people need to hold their own Party Accountable and on both sides put country before party, and i think that is a challenge that we are seeing people fail right now. I hope it stops and i hope that we dont start seeing the same behavior all around. Kimberly and i want to go to dan and kathleen too about other ideas or counter ideas about solution, but keeping in mind , one question that comes to mind as walter was talking was if the only way for the president in particular is to take office is for him to completely divest himself of all of his earnings, especially if he has a company the way that President Trump does, put it in a blind trust or some other way, completely divest yourself, why would that dissuade people from running . Is that too much to ask somebody to do . I want you guys to talk about that and also reforms as you see them. Kathleen so, i personally do not think it is too much to ask to ask a candidate for president to start putting country first. And so requiring divestment or a commitment to divest does not seem like too much to me. But i also want to just come back to something that walter said, when you referred to the conflicts that the office of government ethics had with the white house in may, in the spring of 2017, i believe it was with regard to whether the white house was going to discuss or publish and disclose the waivers it had issued. You said that the office of government ethics did not have much power to compel. Ani think thatou a right that the office ofovernment ethics did not have th traditional power, but what you really masterfully demonstrated is that you had soft power. I think that your interaction with the Trump White House with regard to the waivers and otherwise in 2017 is sort of a case study that really should be studied by students of public administration, as well as law walter perhaps congress. [laughter] kathleen you not only have the commitment and the right position that the white house should disclose these waivers that pretty much showed the ethics executive order was a bit of a joke in how it was ultimately used, but you got them to actually make these disclosures, because you shamed them into it, which is an amazing accomplishment that the office of government ethics was able to shame the white house and the White House Counsels Office into doing the right thing. And so i just want to highlight, as we think of reforms, that we need to keep in mind that, we will refer to them as guardrails, these norms rather than laws, but youre really your masterful handling of that conflict is something that you deserve a lot of credit for, and also perhaps it is something that we need to look for ways to cultivate on the part of other accountability mechanisms within and without of government. Daniel i would add that congress has a role in that because congress has used its Oversight Authority in the past not just to enforce and ensure compliance with the law, but also to enforce written norms. Past president s, when they violated norms against the law, those triggered congressional investigations. So i think congress does need to have that message reinforced. I do disagree with a couple of things, although i agree with most of it and im traveling at the thought of disagree with you about ethics. [laughter] but two things, i want to note we have the longest serving federal election commissioner here in the audience. And the fcc is an example also of the challenges that come with enforcing some of these guardrails and also have the dubious distinction of having to regulate the president , or at least the president s campaign while he is technically the commissioners boss. And the fcc has its challenges, but it is doable and many federal agencies for instance do have an Enforcement Division that is walled off from the rest of the agency. And i tend to think with the fcc that that Enforcement Division should be more powerful, but there is a way to empower career Civil Servants to enforce some of the laws with oversight from the political appointees, so i do not think it is impossible for that to become oge, but i also respect your point of view as having run oge and it does not have to be within oge. I think that there is something to be said for a culture of voluntary compliance and people do not know that a lot of agencies try to combine supervision with enforcement, and you know, the sort of confessor role and the enforcement role, that is a larger discussion on how well that works and maybe they should be desegregated. On conflicts of interest for the president , that is where i disagree. I think the reality is the president is uninvolved in the vast majority of government decisions. That even from very highprofile decisions, the president is supposed to stay out of, like whether to prosecute people. I know that is not the current occupants philosophy, although there is not necessarily an indication that that has been accepted by even his own Justice Department. So i just do not i am having trouble understanding why accusing for the president and his own cabinet does all the time, is such an insurmountable problem. There may be a smaller subset related to national security, for instance, or other things where it is not practical to ask the president to recuse himself, and at that point you start to look at divestment. I agree with kathleen. You become the leader of the free world and it is a lifechanging event. Jimmy carter had to sell his peanut farm. He chose to. He chose to sell the farm. George h. W. Bush had many business interests and he divested from them, so i do not think it is too much to ask and i think that there is a way to expect president s to come up with a plan. And i do not think the law should micromanage what the president does. I think the president with the people advising him or her should just be responsible for doing that. Kimberly that anticipates my next question. Why should the law not micromanage what the president does, and when we have proposals put forward, say there is a complete shift in the congress and administration ahead, say that we will put all the ethics rules down and make sure this none of this happens again . What is the risk of over regulating . Niel i would actuay say one of the issues is the moryou get into congress micromanaging the president s finaes, i do think that there is constitutional concerns raised. I think president s are citizens and is subject to the rest of us. The conflict of interest law is a broad prohibition, so i dont believe there are constitutional concerns with subjecting a president to conflict of interest law, but im not convinced if you are starting to have congress describe what the president can and cannot do. Like every other person in the government, the president should have the obligation to comply and figure out how to comply. Matter,diga practical jimmy carter probably did not need to sell his peanut farm. It is nice you did. Maybe sad, i never asked. But i do not know that we need to force people to do that. I think that there is some truth, as you noted, of not wanting im roll my eyes a little bit at the not wanted to dissuade qualified people from running. If it is really that big a drag to become leader of the free world, fine, do not do it. [laughter] but if it generally does not impact the Public Interest, or if there is a less burdensome way to solve the problem, then i think it is worth exploring that option. I understand that President Trump has built a business that he is very proud of and there are parts of the business that probably could be solved by ,ecusal instead of divestment and there is no reason not to let him do that if it will let him solve the problem. Kimberly kathleen . Kathleen i want to get into some of the nittygritty of the financial conflict of interest statute. And walter and dan may shine some light here that would help us understand how it would actually apply to the president. There are some matters that are scope that they dont they are not even reached by the financial conflict of interest statute. Back in 1990, i believe it was, George Herbert walker bushs administration sought a legal opinion from the Justice Department office of Legal Counsel to find out whether the u. S. Response to iraqs invasion of kuwait implicated the financial conflict statute from for members of the cabinet and others who had Financial Holdings and oil companies, and the office of Legal Counsel, the Justice Department, indicated that the u. S. Response to the iraqi invasion of kuwait was so broad in scope that the financial conflict of interest statute was irrelevant. It did not have to be considered by the cabinet members. And so what i want to flag is the possibility that it may be that most of what a president does is so broad in scope that the financial conflict statute has no application at all to those policy proposals and decisions. On the other hand, i will tell you that if the president is getting involved in prosecution decisions of the Justice Department, that is something narrow enough that absolutely the financial conflict of statute should apply. But the president should not be involved in prosecution decisions. So i guess it would be interested in hearing from dan and walt on whether you have a handle on what percentage of the president s actual activities are likely to implicate the financial conflict statute that applies to the president . Walter since we have an audience probably with a wide range of backgrounds i will try to stay high level, but one of my concerns about applying the existing statute to the president is 18 section 208 and we just refer to it as 208. 208 is a very blunt instrument that is at once overbroad and too narrow. As you said, there are some types of things that are covered by it and some that are not, and it is the difference between a matter, whatever that is, is not covered and a particular matter is covered. And finding the line between the a matter and a particular matter, what makes it particular enough, the definition is a matter that is focused on the interests of a discrete and identifiable class of persons or parties, but in Practical Application there are people who spend all day trying to find out all day everyday try to figure out what is a particular matter and where is the line between matter and particular matter, so some Party Matters are very narrow, like litigation, like the prosecution you mentioned. But others are broader. For instance, regulation affecting any industry. If it affects just one industry, members of that industry are a discrete and identifiable class of persons. So you get into a debate about whether new regulations for opinion,this was an would be a particular matter. Some people are arguing that all it will raise the price for all consumers and all consumers are not a discrete and identifiable class of persons, but the decision was it focuses on the interest of the manufacturer, so it is. That is a relatively clearcut example. Theit gets really wrdnd drops f the edges at oge, because there is a more difficult question filtering of 4500 ethicsid of agency as officials. We have all the most confusing, vague, right on the edge of the line, to the point where the staff would lose faith in to say, does any of this mean anything, because it could be one way or the other. I would remind them that 80 of the time it makes sense, but we are dealing with highlevel officials involved in unusual things and were living in the 20 where it is vague and probably more of the 5 where it turns into quantum mechanics. Part of the problem is the temptation that exists with the president who is behaving, who is carrying out his conduct in the public eye more than any other Government Official, to there would be great pressure to define that so narrowly, anytime there was a debate the white house would come out with detailed explanations of why it is not a particular matter and it would probably coop the department of justices Legal Counsel to engage in mental gymnastics to do a post hoc rationalization on what the president did is ok, and it then starts getting the conflict of interest statute for everyone else, so i worry that at the top level these vagaries can be exploited by a president and then ultimately undermine the law that applies to everybody else if the same law were to apply to them. And i could give you examples, but i would wind up confusing myself and you, because we just had had constant debates. Including for instance, after about 2007 or 2008, we worked in the department of justice and they concluded that a trade negotiation between two countries is not automatically a particular matter, even though there are two parties, meaning the countries, because they are whole countries and you have to look at the subject matter and if it affects all aspects of the economy or a number of different sectors, so it is not a particular matter, even though the thing that an individual Government Employee might work on is affecting only one industry. So a president could not manipulate trade negotiations to his or her benefit and not be covered by this particular statute, where in other areas they are overly covered because of the broad reach of that section. So it is too broad and too narrow. This statute requiring recusal only addresses conflicts of interest in the sense that a conflict of interest might influence your decision making, so you stay out of the matter, you recuse, and therefore, you have resolved the conflict of interest, but it does not get at efforts to curry favor with the president by funneling money to them, which we see with people being willing to pay double the membership fee over the past year at maralago or the d. C. Trump International Hotel making a profit in its first year when it was expected to lose money as most hotels do in their first year, not because it filled every room, but because the people who want to be there, to rub elbows with white house officials who hang out in the bar there, or the president who makes appearances there, are willing to pay well above market rate for the same rooms. So you have the danger of buying access or currying favor, in addition to conflict of interest, and that is why among other reasons, including the technical reason about the damage it might do to legal interpretation, i do not think recusal and subjecting the president to the normal recusal statute is the best option. The two options that i think are really more realistic is either the divestiture statute, because the conflict of interest statute is a recusaltate, meing that you have to stay out of things and not divest things, but divestiture in stronger is stronger medicine the than recusal and so you would have more exceptions for the president and i could live with that, but i still think the better thing is to turn us back as a culture to voluntary compliance by rejecting it into the political process at a point when people do not have to switch parties, because a lot flows from the president s behavior. When the president has a disinterest in government interest, it undermines the publics faith in government and also the Government Officials faith in government and it tempts them to misbehave, because if my boss can do it, why would i be held to a higher level standard then my boss . The higher up you go, the more power and influence you have, so the stricter the rules should be. If my boss can engage in nepotism and conflicts of interest and misuse his position to advertise his properties, why should i, who has some much Less Authority than him behave . , that becomes the thinking that starts corroding and corrupting government at all levels. And so if we can get back to being a country that is a model for all the rest of the world, and we see delegations coming to oge to study our system, i do not think they admire us anymore, and we wont get there necessarily by legislation or as least as comprehensively as we would by creating an enronment where people feel pressure to do the right thing. I do think you have to acknowledge and you alluded to this that there is a bell unringing problem. Daniel it would be nice to get back the norms of george h. W. Bush and that would be great. I dont know if anyone has a solid idea of how to do that. And i think that the law is not a perfect substitute, but perfect cannot be the enemy of the good. I happen to think that the Brennan Center has proposed a and extending conflict of interest law to the president. We have also proposed exceptions we think would be appropriate for the president and there may be others. I tend to think for instance that when the president signs legislation that should be accepted from the conflict statute, because the president s role in the legislative process is indispensable and he or she cannot really do anything without congress, so i think that particular function should not give rise to conflict. I think maybe a materiality threshold, which is a monetary threshold below which we consider it not relevant, which a lot of states have in their conflict regimes, which might also be appropriate. But i think the devil is in the details. Its not perfect, but if we just say we are getting it back to these norms, i am not sure in an era of hyper polarization, where people are very loyal to their party, i dont know thats going to happen. Say that wewant to will go to questions pretty soon, so if you have one, we do have a microphone setup right over here. I think we could also pass it if that is better as well, so just think of we also have sorry, we have one on either side. So just think of that and you can head to the microphones to ask your question. I will ask one more, as a reporter, i think about not just the president but other people and whether there are reforms needed there. Can you talk a little bit about other people . Should we be concerned about the ivanka trump wearing her own close or traveling to china when she has patent deals there . Should wworry about jad kushner going to the middle east to affect piste when there are israelinvestors and s companies . Who else should we be worried about . Walter i think the Jared Kushner any ivanka trump problem stems from the original sin of nepotism that was brought into because it is so uncommon for white house officials to retain as many assets as they retained, but nobody in the white house was willing to lean on them as hard as other officials, because these were the president s own relatives. So i think that we have a nepotism problem, but i think we dont see other people retaining that level of financial interest. But i do think the concern that dan and kathleen expressed about privately Held Companies, that i agree with, is universally applicable to everyone. And is a dangerous gap, and i do think it makes sense to treat at least family privately Held Companies, or maybe possibly privately Held Companies, differently than publicly traded companies. Kimberly kathleen . Kathleen i think that is a really key reform. This came up actually a few months ago when there were news stories related to think it is referred to as the paradise and the secretary of commerce and a member of congress who had been involved in the confirmation process, i believe, did not realize the secretary of commerce was essentially in business with russian oligarchs and putins son in law. He didnt realize that because that information was not apparent on the face of these disclosure forms. However, if congress were to clarify and propose and get adopted enhanced disclosure obligations, then someone like the secretary of commerce and others will have to disclose not but their ownership of llcs the key customers of those llcs and the financial relationship of those privately held llcs so that both the conflict of interest, vetting people within the executive branch, and the congress and the senate would have access to information that they need. Daniel there is one dimension of this. And kathleen you have written eloquently about this. There is a temptation every time that you have after watergate for instance, to have Ethics Reform, which is why the attorney at doj, do not get a drink with somebody who will buy it for you because you may have have run afoul ofome rule. I do think that we neeto be mindful of the fact that ordinary, federal employees are already quite regulated. This is a situation that calls for targeted solutions and Thoughtful Solutions and possibly more to do with the machinery of Administration Enforcement with og than it does with another way of omnibus Ethics Reform that will impose more restrictions on every lowlevel Government Employee. It is something i really came to by reading some of your scholarship, and i think its an important point that we need to keep in mind. Kathleen thank you. I want to acknowledge how rare it is for scholarship to have any kind of impact that all. [laughter] daniel i have to agree that thats a really good point. For example, we need smart reforms. Right now, a staff attorney at epa could not go and represent on a pro bono basis of veteran who needs help with the Social Security administration or the v. A. Because there is a criminal conflict of interest to the that extends entire government and keeps them from representing people. So i have never liked that where it is just your agencies you have influence over, and so i think we have to be careful that there could be a wave of reforms where people think more is more and they slather on a solution that is like a sledgehammer when a scalpel is needed. Kimberly we have a question right here. Thank you. I would really like to begin and i admire the courage with which he stood up to authority and you inspire many of us in the room. My question is really following on what kathleen said about this whole issue of llcs. It is not just really the llcs that are in the Financial Disclosure forms. You really cannot understand the liabilities. We have seen articles in buzz feed news last week and usa today which really points out that the majority of the trump organizations Real Estate Sales have been through these secretive llc companies, especially in the time since he became president , and we do not understand really who the true Beneficial Owner is behind the shell companies. We really cant unpackage who is try to buy influence. So in that sense, number one, would better disclosure help . And is disclosure enough . I and beginning to think that after listening to all of you that divesting completely is the answer, given all these questions. I want to give themy a chance to respond. Go ahead. You can start, kathleen. Kathleen the buzz feed articles thesesa today are about transactions and they really identify key problem that affects us in terms of government ethics and it is a much broader problem societywide in the United States, regarding the lack of transparency with regard to real estate transactions in particular, not just llcs, but the potential for Money Laundering and so on. So i guess well, i absolutely think that we need to be cautious about layering on additional government ethics standards, because more is not always better. I will say that this area of real estate transactions and the lack of transparency with regard to llcs generally, not just in regard to Government Officials, is a really key problem that we need action on. Walter i think that is right. I havent heard any proposals from anyone that would require a company to disclose its customer so im not even sure there is a proposal out there that would get at this, yet as you point out, its a very serious problem that we dont know who is finally moaning funneling money to the president or what purpose if they are paying moffett rate or above or what the thing is actually worth. Back to mygoes consent that i dont know if you solve the problem with that divestiture, because you have so much potential for things to flow to a president , particularly through these privately Held Companies. I would be less worried if they held stock in gm, and gm was selling off assets and property. I dont know if i feel the need to know who they are selling them off too, because it is a Big Enough Company that a dont think decisions are being made to benefit a president , but these privately Held Companies that he holds are selling to privately Held Companies that obscure the buyer and you already have, the articles you mentioned, and i think that people missed it because i did not see it getting as much coverage as it should. Witnesscalled global work with reuters to release a really damning report on Money Laundering activities. I dont think they ever alleged he was personally involved in Money Laundering, but that this was going on in these types of businesses seems to be the implication of the report. Now we have a president who at least adjacent to this activity and it makes him vulnerable to blackmail or funneling of money to him and we have no way of gathering the information because these privately Held Companies are not required to disclose it. I just want to get to one point. Kimberly very quickly, one point. There are bills in congress that address anonymous funding, so we need to Pay Attention to that issue, and secondly the real estate issue, acquiring real estate, the companies, agents and otherwise, it is Due Diligence so it does not require an act of congress. That is just rulemaking by treasury. Kimberly did you want to talk . Daniel two things, one is the llc problem, the Brennan Center is based in new york and the llcs are central to new yorks crisis of corruption. They were central to several large scandals. I do believe in transparency and i do think that some combination of transparency rules and recusal rules or divestment rules can be effective. I want to come back to not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. I do not think that transparency is meaningless. I think it can make a big difference. Kimberly it was my fault for not saying the questioner should say who your name is and make it a onepoint question. My name is bill and i actually have two questions. One is easy. The office of government ethics renders opinions. Are they compulsory or voluntary to follow . Can somebody explain the rationale of the gsa decisions to allow the Top Organization to maintain the tenant agreement at the post Office Department . Walter the first question is a lot easier than the second so i will dive in on that one. Oges opinions are interpretive, so it is not a matter of compulsory or noncompulsory. Only g is taking the position that this is what the law means, at least in terms of legal opinions. It also issues some program advisories where it gives instructions to agencies and it has taken the position that he can direct agencies to do things, like produce documents or change the way that they track things, or we recently required them to start using the electronic Financial Disclosure system, unless they applied for a waiver to that. But in terms of the legal opinions, those are interpretive and oge coordinates with the department of justice when it involves the criminal statutes. And oge cannot bind the department of justice, so they could still prosecute somebody, but you could talk a prosecutor out of prosecuting if you were able to say i relied on this opinion, and so as a practical matter, they have the effect of being compulsory because they are your best guidance on what the law is, but they are not written as orders to go and do something. Kathleen on the gsa question, regarding the interpretation of the lease for the trump hotel, the gsa interpretation is nonsensical. [laughter] that is a good word for it. Kathleen i would like to acknowledge the decision was not actually to me its interesting. It was not actually written by a lawyer at gsa. It was written by a contracting official. I want to emphasize the nonsensibility of it would not depend on a law degree or any kind of legal education, but on the other hand, i am intrigued ie fact that it wasnt mean, im a teacher of legal ethics, so perhaps for that reason, i am intrigued by the fact it was not touched or not apparently touched by a lawyer but made by a contract officer. It just doesnt make any sense because its says the president would not benefit from the lease because he wont actually receive the benefit until after he leaves office, but to suggest that is not a benefit is nonsensical. Daniel i am math illiterate, completely, and finance illiterate too, god help me, but even i know what a capital account is and i know because just because you dont take distributions from your capital account does not mean it is not yours. If the profits from the hotel are going into his capital account, the account is going up and asked kathleen said, basically because the money would not actually go out until after he leaves office, he was not benefiting. Walter i would add an adjective. Instead of nonsensical, it is surly. They really mocks what it takes as the outside world lack and white reading of the very plain language. Just a quick funny story. Shortly before the inauguration, gsa was issuing press statements saying that oge decides ethical issues and not us, and i got so mad that they were sicking the press on us over this, so i called them up and said, if you want us to make that decision, i will do it today, so unless youre ready to make the decision, stop issuing these purse releases that we have control over this outcome, because if i have control over it, i know what i will decide. And then they changed their press statement. Kimberly go ahead. Thank you for your presentation. Im thinking that ethics rule not only applied to the current conflict ofthe interest directly about issues, but im thinking for all professions, if they are a areonsible and they operating outside ethic rule, they should be prosecuted too. ,i just wonder is there anything that agovernment professional, especially the doj, if they do not prosecute the right person, that means they are benefiting indirectly, so this to me is a violation of the ethics rules. Is there anything that somewhere people can speak up and say it has got to stop . Walter i think your sentiment is right that they should stop, but unfortunately or fortunately , its a question of the difference between common sense ethics and the legal statutes that create the framework for ethics. Unless there is a specific criminal law you have violated, you cant be prosecuted. Interestingly, this administration itself acknowledged this concept in a letter that Mick Mulvaney issued after secretary price lost his job for horsing around on luxury jets. And they had a line in there that said just because its legal doesnt mean its right. And i almost keeled over laughi, because this is what i had been saying to this administration all along and ha they had been telling me i was out of line. They are just not living up to it. So i think maybe the answer is just because somebody is not going to be prosecuted is not mean the behavior is acceptable. Does not mean the behavior is acceptable. And i meant to say this earlier with Something Else, but i think it relates here with regard to prosecution, because one of the areas we have seen the norms break down is with the president interfering with the department of justice, whether it is interviewing applicants for the districts he has properties in, or having the white House Counsel go out to find out if there is a secret award, or calling for the prosecution of his rivals um, there is a real susceptibility to political influence on prosecution in our country, so i think that we benefit from this line where you cant beat prosecuted be prosecuted just because its wrong. You have to actually violate any statute, because the potential for abuse in the other direction would be terrible, because then the president is in charge and he can decide who he does not like and have jim acosta from cnn prosecuted because he asked the hard question that was on everybodys minds. Interestingly though, in the early to mid2000, oge is part of these International Anticorruption mechanisms and some of them do reviews of each others countries, and the feedback that the u. S. Kept getting was prosecutors do not have enough independence in our country and are too vulnerable to political influence. At the time, it made no sense to me, and i thought that sounded crazy. I think we now see what they were talking about when the International Community was expressing concern that the criminal investigative apparatus of our country could be abused for political reasons, because these prosecutors report to political appointees and ultimately to the president. So i think we want to be careful not to go necessarily beyond the balance of law when it comes to imposing punishments, but in terms of demanding that people live up to the ethical traditions, i do not think that is too much to ask. Kimberly i want to get to the next question, a quick question if you can. Let us know who you are. Im a reporter with fcw. Are there two sets of rules for the bureaucracy and politicos in the white house . Walter, you touched on this. What concerns do you have or how long before this sort of way the Trump Administration operates ethically trickles down to procurement officers or lowerlevel Government Employees . Walter there are two sets of rules, but the good news is that the rules that apply to everybody and there are a few additional rules that apply to the higher level political appointees. While the president and the Vice President are exempt, political appointees have all the normal rules plus some bans like on outside income. So thats ok. We dont have this problem except for the president and the Vice President being exempted from statutes. In terms of individual procurement officials. , i stopped confidence that all the normal apparatuses in place for career level employees are so far holding with no administer indication of change. Theres a workforce of millions of people that you will have the occasional bad eggs. Seen widespread trickle down to the violation of procurement rules. You can have bid protests and their actual Enforcement Mechanisms where the injured parties can hold the government accountable and undo a contract. That is unfortunately one of the most sinister things out there is this phrase deep state because what they are calling deep state are people who have a firm belief in the rule of law and the structures in place to protect the integrity of the government, like procurement officials, who are not going to obey taintctions from above to procurement, but instead are going to insist on the normal rules. If any of you are fans of the office, its like Michael Scott complaining about toby being the wet blanket and saying that we have rules. I think that denigrates what is actually one of the best things about our government is that we have people who no matter what are going to follow the rules, even if their bosses are pushing otherwise. Kathleen if i can respond, i want to underscore something that you said earlier. When you are talking about the pressure that would be placed on the Justice Department to interpret the financial conflict statute in a really lax way, if it applied to the president , we have seen that dynamic. We have seen it with regard to this current interpretation of the foreign emoluments clause. Because the Justice Department has taken a really strong line, up until the Trump Administration, that the clause absolutely prohibits for value exchanges between a Government Official and a foreign government, prohibiting the u. S. Official from receiving compensation for services provided. No indication it is just limited to gifts, but now in litigation , the justicdepartmentnow the foreign emoluments clause is in litigation and at issue, it interprets the emoluments clause more narrowly than it has before, so that it wouldnt apply to for value exchanges with Government Officials, and that is not limited to the president. That weakens the clause as enter interpreted by the Justice Department to all federal officials. Daniel that illustrates one of the things in our report that we pointed out. The Justice Department in particular i do not think is the best enforcer of these roles. This is why i think that you need to have some sort of independent ethics regulator for a variety of reasons. The Justice Department is not wellsuited for this. We have a couple minutes left. Im going to pick up on that is one of the reasons im glad you mentioned our cabinet hopping manager. A few you have thought about any additional protections, like you or the director who applied to those folks at agencies who are looked upon and through action taken by senior political is worth certified actions that those officials use as cover when justified procurement decisions are affected. They are the last thing that would be affected because companies can be sued if they get cheated out of contracts. At the other end of the gave, you have rules the good example, the travel rules have subjective requirements and career officials in the lower level appointees Work Together to come up with these decisions, saying it is ok to take this serious to take this luxurious charter jet the distance from washington dc to finland, even though you have to drive an hour to the airport and the drive is only 2. 5 hours, so we could save money by sending you them by an uber. So we have seen some corrupting influence, because these people assume that they operate in darkness. My group filed a foia request for gsa for the travel reports on because all agencies are required to file them and gsa give the sleaziest response, they said, you have to request it from each of the agencies, even though we havent all here, and denied the request. It was despicable. So i think that these people that they were going to operate in darkness, and then a couple of reporters from politico, they were sticking out in airport and caught secretary price, and suddenly these decisions are exposed to the public and now to agencies have said that the documentation is in adequate and these people just said, yes, i think it meets the standard, and they just in the standard without justifying it. So i think there is real danger for that. I even saw a distinction among the ethics officials where some stood their ground and tried to apply the same standards to these incoming appointees, who had gotten the message that ethics does not matter. And others just cave like what ever i cannot think of a good analogy, whatever caves. [laughter] and i found myself having to give them pep talks or snarls, orbiting my fists, whatever i could do to beg and plead them to hold these folks to the same standards that they held people in the bush administration, and in the obama administration, because they were so intimidated by a perceived ruthlessness and a group of people, who for instance, asked the department of energy to provide a list of everybody who had worked on Climate Change issues and feared retaliation. I think the answer to your question, it would be nice if there were more protections along the lines of whistleblower type protections, except this is not quite was and i do not have my mind around how we would enforce it. One way might be for each individual requirement, create transparency provisions. One thing i proposed to congress for instance, was to have gsa host all the trouble reports on the website and require more information to be put in, like, why did you choose a charter jet as opposed to a firstclass ticket . So i think the key is to look for Enforcement Mechanisms, or at least transparency mechanisms. One of the accountability mechanism that could come into place here to ensure protections, because disclosure that such a proposed trip would standards, it does qualify for whistleblower protection under the whistleblower protection act. That is the one one of the things we look for. Seen underually special counsel, that continues. The last word is yours if you want it. Ok. So first of all, i want to thank my copanelists for participating. I think it was a wonderful discussion. Just building off of that, i want to end with two things. Issues thatthese have come up with this administration are related hurt whistleblower protections come ethics, limits on president ial power. It is important to think of it as a holistic package. One thing that will be a challenge for people in the years ahead is trying to you know, like the dam that sprouts many leaks, figure out how to tackle the whole as opposed to various constituent parts. There is a sidling tendency that people will have to fight against. The second thing i want to areasize again, we know we very committed to the idea that the perfect cannot be the enemy of the good or did none of these solutions is without drawbacks. The debate continues and you have to factor in that nothing will solve all of these problems. But at the same time, you can make progress. The last thing i will say is a lot of the discussion has been about President Trump. That is true but there is more, our democracy is bigger than any one public official. These are rules that will be with us long after this president is gone and the next as wel aboutore we can think what is in our country passes longterm interest and divorce it from anger at what you might as a particular excess of this administration, the better. As the particular excesses of this administration, i think the better. On behalf of the brennan as s of this administration, the better. Center for justice at nyu here in d. C. , i would like to thank all of you here in d. C. For joining us live in the audience as well as those of us who joined us via livestream or cspan. I would like to ask you here to join me in thanking them. [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2017] the hill reported a little earlier today a Bipartisan Group of senators including members of the leadership will meet to this evening as they look for a deal on immigration. Senator john cornyn told reporters a Bipartisan Group put together by senator Susan Collins and Lindsey Graham will meet at 5 00 today. The Number Two Senate republican, senator dick