Mr Shap, thanks for joining us. UH. First of all, just remind us what the Office of Government Ethics is and what authority it has. So, the Office of Government Ethics is the supervising ethics office for the executive branch of the federal government, and that term supervising Ethics Office comes straight out of the Ethics and Government Act. O g E has authority over a very specific set of ethics rules and statutes and executive orders that apply across
the executive branch. There's only seventy or eighty employees at o g E at any one time, but there are forty five hundred agency ethics officials across the government, and o g E doesn't directly supervise them, but oversees their work, audits them, provides them with advice and training, and works very closely with them to ensure uniform application of the ethics rules across the executive branch. So that office is
generally pretty behind the scenes. But when Donald Trump was elected, your office pretty quickly went public on Twitter, UH and saying he should divest his business interests. Why did you decide to be so lot spoken that way? So to explain that, I have to explain a little bit about how o GE functions. O g E has a lot
of authority, but literally almost no power. And the difference between authority and power, in my mind is that a federal court judge can issue an order telling you to do something, but it's the us the threat that the U. S. Marshals will show up in your doorstep if you don't do it that makes you comply, And so you've got the authority to issue the order and the power to
enforce the order. O g E has a lot of authority, but no power to actually enforce the determinations it makes, and so it works closely with the White House in
any administration. Uh And in fact, for such a tiny, minuscule entity in the federal government, it's got an incredibly disparate porginate level of access to the White House, usually through the White House Counsel's Office, And so if o G ran into an individual official or an agency that wasn't doing what it said was required, O g E could call up the White House Counsel's office and usually by the next morning they'd be on the phone saying,
what can we do to help you? From that agency because they would have gotten a call from the White House Council's office, and with presidential nominees, they need o G E to sign off on their paperwork and their ethics agreements before they can go before the Senate for a confirmation hearing. So the two sources of authority that o G is traditionally relied on or power has been leveraging assistance from the White House or withholding clearance on
a presidential nominee. UH. It became very quickly clear after the election that we did not have the support of the person who was going to become the White House Council and his team, and so the primary means forgetting things done working with them was just out the window. And in fact I had trouble getting them to respond to messages or answer questions, and so it simply became
a matter of last resort. There's some legislative history where congressional committees issued some reports saying that o G the threat that O G E might go public with issues was a useful tool for o GE to help keep people in line in the absence of any authority, and I was mindful of those Senate and House reports at the time UH and decided I needed to try something new in order to be able to communicate with folks who are not listening. So the president, of course did
not divest all of his business assets. What dangers do you see from that decision? Well, I think the dangerous have gone from being hypothetical to very real. We now have reports in the newspaper and on TV about government officials hanging out at the Trump Washington Hotel. And you've got foreign governments and lobbyists and business people and charities and politicians holding events there. Uh, And it raises the very real appearance that they are trying to curry favor
with the president or gain access to government officials. And you've got the president spending countless weekends. Actually I shouldn't say countless. There are people who are accounting them, and there are a lot of them at his properties, and every time he goes there, it's a free advertisement for his properties. And he doesn't refrain from talking about things like the beautiful chocolate cake that he was eating when
he lobbed missiles at an airfield in Syria. And so you've got, uh, somebody appearing to misuse the presidency to try to profit from it. You've got him not selling his financial interest, and so there are rampant conflicts of interest when people going there and trying to gain access to him, and you have the less visible conflicts of interest. He's got very complex financial holdings, uh, and they're in this shell game of shell company after shell company that
creates this byzantine maze of his holdings. And it's very hard to get your mind around what he truly has in terms of financial interests because of the way these assets are structured, and because the financial disclosure system doesn't require him to disclose business liabilities or business partners, so we can't know who's got their hooks into him. Wouldn't a lot of those issues have been there regardless of
whether what he did. I mean, if he had divested his assets right away, wouldn't there have been an opportunity for folks to curry favor with him by paying an inflated amount, or if he had transferred them to his children, of course they would continue to benefit from owning those assets. Was there really any way around this problem? I truly
think there is. If he had sold it, and he had taken care to sell it for market value, he certainly could have brought an independent analysts to assess the values of the businesses he was selling, and he would have been able to put it together a legitimate explanation as to why he took the amount of money that he did for anything he sold. And let's remember it
would be a one time deal. He'd sell it, he'd have the money, and even if somebody had lingering doubts about whether he sold it for a fair price, he's taken the money. Now they don't have any more leverage over him. They can't say, hey, remember that time I paid you too much? Can you do something nice for me? Now? The reality is his transaction with them is over. They would have paid him whatever they paid him, and they could have at best hoped for some kind of favor,
but they wouldn't have had continuing hooks in him. I also think there were some very simple things he could have done if he had chosen not to sell his assets. He could have simply announced that he nor anyone in
his administration would go to events Trump properties. Imagine how much that would reduce the incentive for a foreign government or business association to throw an event at the Trump properties if they knew that they were not going to be able to get access to government officials there and in fact, if they held it there, they would lose the attendance of any government officials. So he really could have done a lot more with some very simple measures
to reduce this problem. Asiphon the divestiture issue, what 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. Uh. We recently had some Twitter posts and I don't want to name the names or the books because I don't
want to get free advertising the books. But you can search Twitter and you'll see images of some White House officials posing with the author of a book and holding up his book, and the same with the President holding up somebody's book. And you've got a White House counsel 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 has already violated a rule and you're saying to them after the fact, it's okay. But the whole purpose of a waiver provision is to take a decision out of your own hands and have somebody else make the decision whether you can participate in something.
But if you just go and do it on your own and then come back afterwards and say, hey, can I have a retroactive waiver, you've thrown the whole purpose of the waiver provision out the door by deciding for
yourself to not worry about your own conflicts of interest. So, with that kind of tone, and we're seeing nominees who are pushing back harder than we've seen before, which which makes the nominee program more resource intensive for o g. E. Interestingly, on that point, though at the time that I left, I was able to tout statistics that we were moving President Trump's nominees faster than we had moved to President
Obama's nominees eight years earlier. Despite the White House continuing to smear o G E by spreading stories even as recently as this past week when the Daily Caller ransom story about Secretary Zinky saying that o G is intentionally slowing down nominees, the actual stats show that o G s moving them faster uh than in the past administration, even though the reports are much more complex because the people are much wealthier and they're pushing back more than
than in other administrations. So all of that puts a strain on the ethics program, puts a strain on the morality employees working on it, and means that every single time and ethics official goes and talks to a government official about an ethics requirement, the person can throw up their hands and say to the ethics official when the president doesn't have to do this, so why do I? And that is really not the way to run an
ethics program in the government. So when you were the director of o g E, 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'd 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 the two of them was actually a member of the class of the persons he issued them too. So here he's saying, I hear I waive
it 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. One last thing for you in your mind, are we going to be
able to recover from this period? Has this administration so lower the ethics bar that future administrations will be able to skirt some of these rule as well? Well? I think that's a big concern because some of the things that I've been expressing UH concerns about in the ethics area have to do with ethical norms that are being departed from, as opposed to strictly speaking violations of law. And so we were always able to count on people to behave a certain way and follow certain pretty well
defined ethical traditions in the executive branch. Now you've got somebody who's largely getting away with not doing that. And the concern is the next president of the next administration can point to this one and say, well, they didn't do it, so we don't have to either. And I think we should be particularly careful, uh with um members of the opposite party. You could have a Democratic candidate much more easily than a Republican candidates say well, the
other guy got away with it. That Republican president got away with it, so you can't criticize me, and I think we really need to be sure to hold both sides feet to the fire and not give anyone a free pass going forward to make sure that we turn this into a one time aberration rather than the new norm for ethics and government. I want to thank Walter shab the former director of the Office of Government Ethics, now the senior director of Ethics at the Campaign Legal
Center here in Washington. Thanks for joining us on Bloomberg Law.