Update: NBC is reporting that the Office of Government Ethics has lost contact with Trump and his transition team.
They quote an email sent to Trump aides in November from the Office of Government Ethics Director Walter Shaub that raises concerns about the lack of contact with the Trump team, “we seem to have lost contact with the Trump-Pence transition since the election.”
Shaub also suggested that the hurried nature and lack of ethics review risked “embarrassment for the President-elect,” because “announcing cabinet picks” without letting the ethics office review their financial information in advance.
The NBC piece goes further quoting Schaub,
“They run the risk of having inadvertently violated the criminal conflicts of interest restriction at 18 USC 208,” Shaub wrote, citing a federal conflicts law in an email to Trump Transition aide Sean Doocey.
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Top ethics officials are ringing alarm bells about that the Republican plan to quickly force through Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks through their confirmation process.
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Republicans trying to push through Trump cabinet picks
Republicans plan to quickly push through Trump picks, but ethics officials are saying that the government investigators who are responsible for doing ethics and background reviews of the Cabinet picks are overwhelmed and that it would be unprecedented to push confirmation through before the reviews are complete.
On Saturday, Democrats raised their own concerns and called for a delay of the confirmation process. However, Republicans are continuing to signal that they won’t be delaying the confirmation hearings.
Several of Donald Trump’s nominations have raised major concerns. Trump’s pick for Attorney General Jeff Sessions has previously been rejected by the Senate because of racist comments he made. And Donald Trump’s choice for Secretary of State has raised concerns because of his close relationship with Vladamir Putin and long history of cozy business ties with Russia. The Trump administration-in-waiting faces its first big test in coming days, with as many as seven nominees for Cabinet positions — many of them already the subject of questions about their qualifications — scheduled to appear on Capitol Hill.
Democrats have indicated that they will try to use the cabinet hearings as a way to discredit Trump’s new government. They hope to connect his cabinet picks to the sprawling global business interests that Trump holds and has not separated himself from.
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Republicans creating potentially unknown or unresolved ethics issues shortly before their scheduled hearings
Mitch McConnell who is trying to force through the cabinet hearings has ignored warnings from Walter Shaub Jr., the director of the Office of Government Ethics. Shaub released a letter on Friday saying that the current confirmation calendar is “of great concern to me” because nominees have not completed a required ethics review before their hearings.
The schedule “has created undue pressure on OGE’s staff and agency ethics officials to rush through these important reviews,” Shaub wrote in response to an inquiry by Democratic senators. “More significantly, it has left some of the nominees with potentially unknown or unresolved ethics issues shortly before their scheduled hearings.”
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