Ethics in Government

Eleanor Eagan, Jeff Hauser, and Adewale Maye
You have likely not heard of Joseph Otting, as he has generated comparatively little attention amidst the circus that is President Trump’s executive branch. However, he is a deeply problematic official who has quietly amassed power in critical agencies that receive far too little attention given their impact on the economy and housing. Amazingly, Otting seems to be using these agencies to act upon resentments he developed as a “controversial,” at best, banking executive, making him a perfect representative of why we are concerned by the revolving door problem in our federal government.

With the departures of Gary Cohn, Steve Bannon, and Dina Powell from the White House, has Goldman Sachs’ initial influence on the Trump Administration dwindled?

CNN asked that question this spring, noting that “one by one, almost all the high-profile Goldman Sachs alums have left the White House.” But as CNN, to its credit, also noted that while who is up and who is down in the Trump White House changes, leadership at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has been more stable — and Goldman Sachs’ former lawyer, Chairman Jay Clayton, runs that key agency.

At first glance, the contentious Brett Kavanaugh confirmation process and the Trump Administration’s response to the apparent brutal assassination of Jamal Khashoggi have very little in common. But there is one disturbing commonality — a shocking lack of transparency into the motivations of key players.

The most important battleground of the Kavanaugh confirmation fight is not a specific issue, but whether people pay attention to the nomination itself. To some, the focus on Trump and Russia is a distraction from the Supreme Court fight.  But, in reality, the focus on Trump and Russia helps highlight exactly what’s at stake in this fight.

From cable news to social media, from the NFL to Kanye West’s Twitter feed — people spend an enormous amount of time discussing President Donald Trump. Oddly, the only people not spending much time discussing Trump — his corruption, his malfeasance, his lack of fitness for office — are the ones who have the most invested in publicizing Trump’s blatant corruption: the Democrats. As evidenced by recent national security news, Trump’s corruption poses a clear and present danger to your wallet, your economic future, and the health and well-being of the planet. And yet somehow, the Democrats are failing to connect the dots.

From investigating money laundering to enforcing America’s drug laws, U.S. attorneys possess a considerable amount of discretion in how to allocate the Department of Justice’s scarce law enforcement resources. Each of the 93 U.S. attorneys has the ability to make prosecutions of various federal statutes more or less likely and sentencing for any violations more or less draconian.

The only solution out of the quagmire of Trump’s National Finance Chair supervising an agency critical to Mueller’s investigation is for Mnuchin to recuse himself from supervision of FinCEN during the duration of Mueller’s investigation.

Jeff Hauser runs the Revolving Door Project, an effort to increase scrutiny on executive branch appointments and ensure that political appointees are focused on serving the public interest, rather than personal professional advancement. Today’s announcement that the Trump Administration would install David Kautter as the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service on November 12th, 2017 without a Senate confirmation process marks a further erosion of the Senate’s “Advice and Consent” power and a great day for all tax evaders, past and future. Kautter, a tax avoidance professional, has no history of work at the IRS, which many people have incorrectly assumed is (as it ought to be) a precondition for an ostensibly temporary hire. However, Kautter does have experience with the IRS. When Kautter was Director of National Tax at EY (formerly Ernst and Young) National Tax practice, their practices were so abusive that they ultimately had to pay $123 million to avoid criminal indictment. Why would the American people trust Kautter to rein in tax evasion when his firm behaved so egregiously under his ineffective and/or malevolent watch?

On the 17th of this month, a group of House Democrats, including Representative John Delaney (D-MD.), delivered a letter to President Trump offering, essentially, a trade: A tax holiday for international corporations in exchange for the guarantee that the money from that repatriation would be used exclusively to fund the country’s long-overdue infrastructure maintenance projects. Earlier this year Rep. Delaney also authored a tax and infrastructure bill which would allow corporations with funds outside the U.S. to return that money to the country at a tax rate of 8.57 percent (instead of the top corporate tax rate of 35 percent). Delaney, in his statement, called the bill a “pro-growth reform” and his co-sponsor, Rep. Rodney Davis (R-IL), said that it would “spur job creation”.

Tuesday night, Rachel Maddow and David Cay Johnston revealed Donald Trump’s 2005 two-page Form 1040 on air. Before revealing the form, Maddow made an extended argument that Donald Trump must release his complete tax returns in order to disclose all potential conflicts of interest from his business empire, including potentially income from foreign governments.  We agree — but tax returns are merely a starting point for understanding Trump’s business partners. In one example, Maddow pointed to a sketchy real estate deal with a Russian oligarch. Donald Trump purchased a piece of property in Florida for $40 million in 2005. Just three years later, Trump sold the property for $100 million to a Russian oligarch (i.e., a rich Russian businessperson closely tied to Putin’s government) named Dmitry Rybolovlev. Trump’s 150% return on investment in just three years would be suspiciously large even if the real estate magnate had bought an undervalued property and improved it. However, Rybolovlev actually quickly tore down the 62,000 square foot mansion and sold it off in three pieces. How the value of the property appreciated so quickly is a mystery, especially as the Florida’s real estate market was collapsing.

As I’ve noted previously, Donald Trump’s relationship with billionaire hedge funder John Paulson seems likely to be very, very good for Paulson.  

Paulson, who came to fame making $4  billion personally by betting against the housing bubble, also seems about to win big on having bet against pre-election favorite Hillary Clinton.

Interestingly, it now seems clear that the relationship between Paulson and Trump is mutually profitable.

There is belated but considerable press attention to Donald Trump’s nearly inextricable conflicts of interest. He and his family run a complex, far-flung, non-public company that largely relies on his name as a branding asset. Entities without America’s public interest in mind, be they foreign or domestic companies, are already beginning to cultivate the Trump family. Ivanka Trump, groomed to run the family business in something that will be a blind trust only in the most Orwellian sense imaginable, is being included in with international leaders potentially useful to “The Trump Organization.”