https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/poli...1&cvid=bc090ee1591744e49660ae414e4a4fdf&ei=26
trump signed a law into place in his first term and now wont even follow it lol.
A bipartisan bill to boost transparency and make sure incoming presidents stick to an
ethics plan was so uncontroversial that it passed the Senate by a voice vote in 2020.
Donald Trump then signed it into law.
But now, after blowing past deadlines to adhere to the law after winning the
White House a second time, Trump appears to have excluded himself from those same
ethical guidelines.
Trump missed two months of deadlines before
finally signing off on an agreement with President
Joe Biden’s administration to
begin the presidential transition process this week.
But the agreement does not appear to include the president-elect’s pledge to avoid conflicts of interest while in office, despite requirements under a renewed Presidential Transition Act he signed into law four years earlier.
Trump’s team is turning down federal funding and office space for his
transition team — as well as official government checks and security checks for his staff. The president-elect has rebuffed agreements with the Department of Justice to process security clearances to access classified information during the transition.
“This announcement fails to answer key questions about national security threats and FBI vetting of nominees, and increases concerns about corruption,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren, who co-wrote the Presidential Transition Act.
“There appear to be serious gaps between the Trump transition’s ethics agreement and the letter of the law,” she said. “The reliance on private donors to fund the transition is nothing more than a ploy for well-connected Trump insiders to line their pockets while pretending to save taxpayers money.”
The team said it is turning down federal support “consistent with President Trump’s commitment to save taxpayers’ hard-earned money,” his campaign said in a statement.
But accepting the money would have put a $5,000 cap on individual donations to the transition and require the public disclosure of donors.
By turning down roughly $7 million in federal funding for the transition process, Trump will be able to raise unlimited private donations for the transition.
Trump’s alleged resistance to signing an ethics pledge is a “red flag pointing to nothing so much as greed and corruption and an intention to enrich himself and/or his family through the extensive powers of his office,” according to Virginia Kase Solomón with democracy advocacy group
Common Cause.
The plan requires transition team members to “avoid both actual and apparent conflicts of interest” and to “safeguard classified information” and “non-public information and other information that is not readily available to the public.”
It also blocks team members from lobbying activities and prohibits them from serving as registered foreign agents while working during the transition
Without thorough reviews of the incoming administration’s financial withholdings and interests by the Office of Government Ethics, those nominees could be in a position to benefit from their proximity to power,
according to Campaign Legal Center counsel Kedric Payne, a former deputy chief counsel with the Office of Congressional Ethics.
“Without this crucial review — which is mandated by law — nominees may enter office with conflicts of interest (obvious or hidden) that they are not ordered to remedy,” Payne said in a statement.
If that happens, “not only are Americans deprived of critical information about those poised to hold immense power, but those power holders could manipulate the government for their own personal benefit while facing little to no consequence,” he added.
Trump’s dismissal of ethics obligations is not only a “break from precedent” but a potentially illegal and “dangerous” scene setter for the years to come, according to Payne.
“If we do not bother to hold some of the most politically powerful members of our government to ethical guidelines before they even enter office, there is little hope that these leaders will bother with ethics guidelines throughout their public service,” he added.
Grifter gonna grift