Well, I was time for our daily Bloomberg Lab Brief, exploring legal issues in the news. And today, Bloomberg Law host Greg Store speaks with Walter's Shops, senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center and former director of the U S Office of Government Ethics, about his departure from the Trump administration. What sort of great do you
give this administration on ethics issues? Well, I'm afraid I'd have to give them a d teetering into f because the tone from the top has trickled down, and you've got government officials who seem to continue to advertise other people's products or their own products from the government, and you've got a White House Council who seems to be sending a message to folks that anything goes and as long as we can make an argument that it's legal,
it's okay. And so after I fought a battle with them for a month to get some very routine ethics records, the White House waivers, I got a hand in my hands on those documents and saw that they were unsigned, undated, and retroactive. And a retroactive waiver means you think somebody's already violated a rule and you're saying to them after the fact, it's okay. So when you were the Director
of GE you were in a rare position. You could criticize the administration from the inside or at least, you know, from an important government position. Uh, and you could uh put some pressure on them to to comply with ethics rules. Um. So why did you leave? Well, I truly felt I had reached the end of what I could achieve from
the inside. And I think it wasn't the deciding factor, but a factor was when I finally got my hands on those waivers I mentioned, and they were unsigned, undated, retroactive, and in fact, the Council to the President who issued two of them was actually a member of the class of the persons he issued them too. So here he's saying,
I hear by waiver for myself, which is absolutely incredible. Um. And so I started feeling like there wasn't more I could do, and I started feeling like they were getting more clever in their reactions to to O g E by sharing less and less information with us, And so I felt like leaving the government, I'd be freer to speak out about it, and in fact, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you if I were still in the government, because ultimately in that role, I may have
been a government watchdog, but my boss was the president, and I had to limit how much I was able to publicly express my concerns, and so I did them through very limited channels. And I have a lot more freedom now to talk about some of these issues. And that's Walter Shob, Senior director of Ethics at the Campaign Legal Center and former director of the U S Office of Government Ethics, speaking with Bloomberg Law host Greg Store.
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