Government Ethics Office head Walter Shaub holds press conference, rips into Donald Trump
In what turned out to be a day of dueling press conference, Donald Trump kicked things off today by angrily battling reporters and threatening while rolling out plan to resolve his financial conflicts of interest which sounded like gibberish to most viewers. Not long after, the head of the Office of Government Ethics held his own press conference, and confirmed what Americans were already thinking: Trump’s faux-divestuture plan is a bunch of phony nonsense.
Director Walter Shaub didn’t quite use those words while ripping into Donald Trump’s freshly unveiled ethics plan. But Shaub, who has worked at the Ethics Office for more than a decade under presidents of both parties, did use words such as “wholly inadequate” while discussing the perception that Trump could be using his office “for professional profit.”
Trump’s plan involves having his sons take over his business interests, but he’ll still retain his ownership in them. Shaub countered that such a plan is “not even close” to being a blind trust, which is considered the standard for presidents. Shaub also pointed out that Donald Trump isn’t even holding himself to the ethics standards that many of his own cabinet nominees have agreed to. As for Trump’s insistence that a president cannot have conflicts of interest by definition, Shaub countered that Trump’s claim is “quite obviously not true.”
