Washington Post: After Trump rebuke, federal ethics chief called to testify before House lawmakers

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House Republicans have summoned the head of the independent federal ethics office to answer questions about his agency and his public criticism of President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to separate from his real estate empire.
A letter sent late Thursday from Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chairman of the GOP-led House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, was viewed by ethics experts as a veiled threat to the budget of the Office of Government Ethics unless its director changes his rhetoric and approach.
The letter to Walter Shaub Jr., director of the Office of Government Ethics, asks him to appear before lawmakers in a closed-door, transcribed interview. Shaub is not being subpoenaed, but was asked to respond to questions in a setting much like a deposition, committee staff said.
“I want to talk about the whole department,” Chaffetz said in an interview. “Mr. Shaub has taken a very aggressive stance on issues he’s never looked at. He’s raised a bunch of eyebrows.”
The chairman said he has not yet decided whether to ask Shaub to testify at a public committee hearing but will wait for the transcribed interview, which was first reported on by the Wall Street Journal.
Ethics expert quickly pounced on the letter as a partisan attack on Shaub for doing his job.
Richard Painter, who served as ethics adviser to former President George W. Bush, called the letter a “clear threat to pull the funding of the Office of Government Ethics” unless the agency follows the wishes of Trump and the Republican leadership. “They are saying lay off Trump and push through these nominees or we’ll kill the funding of OGE,” Painter said. He and other ethics lawyers from both parties said the agency plays an important role, and killing it or reducing its authority would be a blow to avoiding conflicts of interest in a new administration and enforcing basic standards of ethics and transparency.
Shaub, appointed by President Obama to a five-year term that has a year to go, gave an extraordinary public admonishment on Wednesday of Trump’s plan to place his businesses in a trust managed by his elder sons. The ethics chief said the plan was “wholly inadequate” to protect the incoming president from conflicts of interest. “Stepping back from running his business is meaningless from a conflict-of-interest perspective,” Shaub said at a forum at the Brookings Institution. -Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/01/12/federal-ethics-chief-called-to-testify-before-house-lawmakers/?utm_term=.7329911b6479
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