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Democrats Call for Delay in DeVos Hearing Until She Completes Financial Report

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2017 //
10

Democrats in the Senate say that Betsy Devos’ hearing should be delayed because she has not completed her financial disclosure, which is required of all Cabinet appointments. Presumably, she has an accountant.

 

Democrats are pushing to delay Betsy DeVos’ confirmation hearing next Wednesdaybecause the billionaire philanthropist’s finances haven’t yet been cleared by ethics officials, nor has she signed an agreement addressing possible conflicts of interest.

 

Sen. Patty Murray, the committee’s top Democrat, says that she’s concerned about the “extensive financial entanglements and potential conflicts of interest” of President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Education secretary.

 

An aide to Murray told POLITICO that “it would certainly be concerning if nominees break from standard practice and don’t submit their ethics paperwork in advance of a hearing.”

 

Although DeVos submitted her financial disclosures to the Office of Government Ethics on Dec. 12, she is still in discussions to finalize the paperwork and sign an agreement addressing possible conflicts of interest, according to her spokesman, Ed Patru.

 

The ethics office, in coordination with the Education Department, is responsible for identifying any conflicts of interest that DeVos might have and striking an agreement with her to recuse herself from certain decisions to avoid future conflicts.

 

Senate HELP Chairman Lamar Alexander indicated he plans to move ahead with the Jan. 11hearing, regardless of whether the paperwork is finalized. Committee rules don’t require the ethics office to clear a nominee’s finances and sign an ethics agreement before a hearing. But Alexander will require those things before holding a committee vote, an aide said.

 

“Our committee is going to follow the Golden Rule and use the same procedures for these nominees that we did in 2001 for President Bush’s nominees and in 2009 for President Obama’s nominees,” Alexander said in a statement to POLITICO.

 

Democrats dispute that the committee is following the same practice, saying the ethics review of President Barack Obama’s Cabinet nominees was generally completed prior to any confirmation hearing. They argue that government ethics officials’ vetting of DeVos should be completed before her hearing.

 

“Confirmation hearings shouldn’t be held until senators have essential and required information on a nominee,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a member of the committee. “Required financial disclosures and a nominee’s ethics letter go to their basic fitness to serve.”

 

“The Trump administration may be conducting a slipshod vetting process, but the United States Senate should not,” Whitehouse added. “The majority’s conduct ramming and stacking these hearings for unvetted nominees is unprecedented.”

 

Four members of the Senate HELP committee have received campaign contributions from Billionaire Betsy. They should recuse themselves.

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Ethics

Paul Thomas: Can We Get Used to “Anything”?

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2017 //
19

Paul Thomas had a terrible biking accident on Christmas Eve and has endured great pain while he recovers from a broken hip. He is a serious cyclist, not just a guy out for a bike ride. He and his friends were mowed down by a careless driver.

 

During his recreation, he has been thinking more than ever about the world and the mess we are all in.

 

Let him tell you about a novel that he read and the thoughts it provoked. 

 

So as I recover in the weeks leading to my 56th birthday—a new year, a new age, and this new existence forced onto me—I am deeply moved by “you could get used to anything.”

 

Anything?

 

What an ugly thing to be human and having the capacity to get used to anything.

 

But there was a time in the U.S. when slavery was perfectly normal. There was a time in the world when the Holocaust was perfectly normal.

 

Because normal, like history, is the province of those with power, a way to render some Others “deliberately silenced,…preferably unheard.”

 

And today the U.S. is eagerly normalizing a person and ideologies that would have seemed illegitimate just months ago.

 

Make a promise: You will not get used to “anything.” You will never forget what a democracy and a decent society are supposed to be. You will not accept the cruel policies that we are about to experience as normal. They are not normal. Keep your sense of values. There will be another election is less than two years. And another presidential election in less than four years. Hold on to your integrity.

Categories Equity, Ethics, Justice, Trump

Zephyr Teachout: Help to Find Out Which Republicans Voted to Gut the Ethics Office?

By dianeravitch
January 3, 2017 //
23

Zephyr Teachout sent out this email, requesting our help:

 

House Republicans on Monday voted to eviscerate the Office of Congressional Ethics, the independent body created in 2008 to investigate allegations of misconduct by lawmakers after several bribery and corruption scandals sent members to prison.

 

What’s worse, they are trying to keep their votes a secret.

 

While the House GOP stripped the new rule today once their efforts were exposed, it is still extremely important to find out which members voted to gut the Office of Congressional Ethics in the first place. Knowing who’s willing to take this step will be key to stopping them from trying again in the future.

 

I am working with the Sunlight Foundation, Demand Progress, and dozens of other groups so we can track who voted to gut their own ethics agency. If Republicans are going to try gut the office that checks corruption in Congress, we deserve to know who voted to make it happen.

 

Please CALL your Member of Congress and ask the staffer that answers: “Did you vote for the Goodlatte Amendment to gut the Office of Government Ethics?” Report what the Congressmember told you and we’ll add to the public whipsheet.

 

Click here to find the phone number of your Member of Congress, and to report what happened when you called.

 

CALL YOUR MEMBER OF CONGRESS »

 

Secret votes to gut oversight of Congressional corruption should not be tolerated. When you call, be sure to say that you’re a constituent, be polite, and ask if they voted for the Goodlatte Amendment to gut the Office of Government Ethics.

 

Thank you,

 

Zephyr Teachout

Categories Ethics, Republicans

House Republicans Back Down, Withdraw Vote to Gut Ethics Office

By dianeravitch
January 3, 2017 //
12

Faced with public outrage and an indignant press, as well as a couple of tweets from their peerless leader, House Republicans reversed their decision to gut the Office of Congressional Ethics.

 

House Republicans, facing a storm of bipartisan criticism, including from President-elect Donald J. Trump, moved early Tuesday afternoon to reverse their plan to kill the Office of Congressional Ethics. It was an embarrassing turnabout on the first day of business for the new Congress, a day when party leaders were hoping for a show of force to reverse policies of the Obama administration.

 

The reversal came less than 24 hours after House Republicans, meeting in a secret session, voted, over the objections of Speaker Paul D. Ryan, to eliminate the independent ethics office. It was created in 2008 in the aftermath of a series of scandals involving House lawmakers, including three who were sent to jail.

 

What can we learn from his fast turnaround?

 

Even the lackeys of plutocratic power respond to public outcry.

 

Now we know what they intend, only now they know they will have to do it in secret.

 

Their first action on the first day of the New Year shows who they are. It also shows they are gutless wonders.

 

Let all of their mean-spirited actions be met with public outrage, demonstrations, protests, and resistance.

Categories Ethics, Republicans

Trump Tweets a Gentle Chiding about GOP Assault on Ethics Oversight

By dianeravitch
January 3, 2017 //
47

 

@realDonaldTrump tweeted this morning:

 

With all that Congress has to work on, do they really have to make the weakening of the Independent Ethics Watchdog, as unfair as it…

 

……..may be, their number one act and priority. Focus on tax reform, healthcare and so many other things of far greater importance! #DTS

 

Parse that. Did he say, “What terrible judgment! Undo the damage!”

 

No.

 

Why a gentle chiding but no reprimand? Is an ethics investigation really “unfair,” as Trump says? Is he concerned about the action or the optics?

 

What do do you take as the meaning of these two tweets from the Tweeter-in-Chief?

Categories Ethics, Trump

Republicans Gut Independent Ethics Office

By dianeravitch
January 3, 2017 //
52

 

In the first action of the new Trump era, House Republicans stripped power from its independent ethics office.

 

Will the incoming president object? Not a chance.

 

Categories Ethics

Law Professor: Trump Must Relinquish Lease on DC Hotel

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2016 //
40

Donald Trump must give up his 60-year lease on the Trump Hotel near the White House in D.C., says a law professor who studied the terms of the lease.  The building is owned by the federal government and was known as the Old Post Office Building; it was home to federal agencies, such as the Nation Endowment for the Humanities. After it was closed, Trump leased it and turned it into a luxury hotel.

The lease specifically says that no federal official may benefit from the proceeds generated by the building.

NPR reports:

“After Donald Trump is sworn in as president on Jan. 20, he will follow a time-honored tradition and make his way from the U.S. Capitol down Pennsylvania Avenue.

Along the way, just a few blocks before he reaches the White House, he’ll pass the Trump International Hotel. The 263-room luxury hotel is becoming the focus of a debate over conflict of interest between Trump and his business dealings.

Trump doesn’t actually own the landmark building, which was once the headquarters of the U.S. Post Office. In 2013, he signed a 60-year lease for the building with the General Services Administration, which helps manage and support federal agencies. The Trump Organization spent upwards of $200 million on renovations and reopened it as a hotel about a month before the Nov. 8 presidential election.

But there’s a hitch, according to Steven Schooner, a government procurement expert who is also a law professor at the George Washington University School of Law. Schooner has studied the 100-plus-page contract and says there’s a clause that clearly states elected officials should have no role in the lease.

The contract between GSA and the Trump Organization specifically says that no elected official of the United States government shall be party to, share in, or benefit from the contract,” he says, citing clause 37.19 of the contract.

That clause reads:

“No member or delegate to Congress, or elected official of the Government of the United States or the Government of the District of Columbia, shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease or to any benefit that may arise therefrom.”

Schooner says the GSA should terminate the lease before Trump becomes president.

Many potential conflicts

There are a host of reasons to cancel the deal besides the specific language in the contract, according to Schooner. He says foreign diplomats or special-interest groups could book rooms at the Trump International as a way to curry favor with Trump.

Once Trump becomes president, he will effectively be both the tenant and the landlord of the building. The administrator of the GSA, an independent body, is also a political appointee.

So the Trump transition team would be naming the person responsible for the agency that’s managing Trump’s lease. Obviously that’s a problem,” he says.

The Trump transition team did not respond to requests for comment.

Will Congress overlook this legal and ethical breach? Will anyone enforce the law?

Categories Ethics, Trump

Paul Krugman: We Are in For Four Years of Corruption by Conflicts of Interest

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2016 //
52

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning columnist for the New York Times, predicts an unprecedented level of corruption during the Trump years, related to Trump’s refusal to separate himself from his business empire. Will foreign diplomats reserve the $20,000 a night suite at the Trump hotel in D.C. to impress the President? Will governments grant permits expeditiously to build new Trump hotels, casinos and golf courses to curry favor? Will the President appoint members of the National Labor Relations Board to prevent his hotels from being unionized (there is a labor dispute at a Trump hotel in Las Vegas before the NLRB right now).

He writes,

Self-dealing will be the norm throughout this administration. America has just entered an era of unprecedented corruption at the top.

The question you need to ask is why this matters. Hint: It’s not the money, it’s the incentives.

True, we could be talking about a lot of money — think billions, not millions, to Mr. Trump alone (which is why his promise not to take his salary is a sick joke). But America is a very rich country, whose government spends more than $4 trillion a year, so even large-scale looting amounts to rounding error. What’s important is not the money that sticks to the fingers of the inner circle, but what they do to get that money, and the bad policy that results.

Normally, policy reflects some combination of practicality — what works? — and ideology — what fits my preconceptions? And our usual complaint is that ideology all too often overrules the evidence.

But now we’re going to see a third factor powerfully at work: What policies can officials, very much including the man at the top, personally monetize? And the effect will be disastrous.

Let’s start relatively small, with the choice of Betsy DeVos as education secretary. Ms. DeVos has some obvious affinities with Mr. Trump: Her husband is an heir to the fortune created by Amway, a company that has been accused of being a fraudulent scheme and, in 2011, paid $150 million to settle a class-action suit. But what’s really striking is her signature issue, school vouchers, in which parents are given money rather than having their children receive a public education.

At this point there’s a lot of evidence on how well school vouchers actually work, and it’s basically damning. For example, Louisiana’s extensive voucher plan unambiguously reduced student achievement. But voucher advocates won’t take no for an answer. Part of this is ideology, but it’s also true that vouchers might eventually find their way to for-profit educational institutions.

And the track record of for-profit education is truly terrible; the Obama administration has been cracking down on the scams that infest the industry. But things will be different now: For-profit education stocks soared after the election. Two, three, many Trump Universities!

Moving on, I’ve already written about the Trump infrastructure plan, which for no obvious reason involves widespread privatization of public assets. No obvious reason, that is, except the huge opportunities for cronyism and profiteering that would be opened up.

Krugman previously wrote that Trump’s proposal to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure would privatize many of our public assets and become a goldmine for the private sector.

Buckle your seat belts. The next four years will make Teapot Dome look like a tea party.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Ethics, For-Profit, Fraud, Trump, Vouchers

The Activist Who Is Making the FBI Investigate Itself

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2016 //
15

Adele Stan at Alternet tells the story of Jonathan Hutson, a communications specialist in Maryland, who thought that there was something fishy about the FBI’s middle-of-the-night data dump on November 1 of records about Bill Clinton.

To Hutson, who has a law degree from New York University, the November 1 tweet and the timing of the release of the documents about the pardon appeared to be a violation of the Hatch Act, the 1939 law that bars government agencies and their employees from acting to affect the outcome of an election.

“I saw on Twitter that the @FBIRecordsVault had suddenly awakened a week before the election, after a year’s dormancy, and started tweeting biased and incomplete information a week before the election,” Hutson told AlterNet via email. “So as a concerned citizen, I filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Inspector General and with the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility.”

In Hutson’s letter to Wills, he described the materials released by the @FBIRecordsVault account:

[A]t 4:00 a.m. Eastern on October 30, 2016, within two weeks of a presidential election, this FBI Twitter account began tweeting documents relating to Fred Trump, the father of Donald Trump, in which Fred is falsely characterized as a “philanthropist” although the FBI records and public records do not support this unfounded but flattering characterization. On the other hand, the FBI did not release any records on the federal lawsuit against Fred Trump for housing discrimination against people of color in New York. This is the same Fred Trump who had reportedly been arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally.

On the same date, again at the unusual hour of 4:00 a.m., this FBI Twitter account tweeted documents which portrayed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in a negative light.

Then again, less than one week prior to the presidential election, at noon Eastern on November 1, 2016, in violation of Department of Justice guidance and policy against making public statements that might unfairly influence the electorate within 60 days of an election, and in possible violation of the Hatch Act, @FBIRecordsVault tweeted records of decade-old, debunked William J. Clinton Foundation scandals and records of President Clinton’s 2001 pardon of Mark Rich where no wrongdoing had been found in an investigation that has been closed.

The William Clinton Foundation records linked from the tweet do not indicate that there had been no indictment and no finding of any wrongdoing in this closed case. This incomplete nature of the records posted without proper context convey a false and unfair impression that there is some reason for a cloud of suspicion to linger over this matter which has been resolved for more than a decade.

“I found it ironic, significant, and revealing that at the same time, @FBIRecordsVault tweeted the ethics handbook banning FBI employees from interfering or affecting the outcome of elections,” Hutson, a former investigative reporter, told AlterNet via email. “So they knew perfectly well that there was a clear appearance of impropriety in issuing biased tweets even as the FBI director faces criticism for his unprecedented actions on the eve of a presidential election. Why would they do that?”

Now, as a result of Hutson’s complaint, the FBI’s internal investigation unit will investigate whether the Hatch Act was violated by this late-night intrusion into the election.

It just goes to show: One engaged citizen can make a difference. Maybe.

Categories Accountability, Ethics
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