conflict of interest

On President Trump’s $230 Million Justice Dept. Compensation Claim

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

This situation is a) unprecedented b) raises ethics issues that a typical first year law student or a bright 16-year-old could figure out c) is easily resolved, though the solution would be messy to execute and d) is being misrepresented by the news media because of course it is. I have been stalling, I admit, exploring it here because I am sick to death of Trump related controversies, but I just discussed it 45 minutes ago in an ethics seminar, so I can’t avoid the story any longer.

The Facts:  Donald Trump, then a lowly private citizen (but ex-President) submitted a claim, lodged in late 2023, seeking damages for alleged violations of his rights by the F.B.I. and the special counsel tricked -up Russian election tampering investigation. In the summer of 2024, his lawyers filed a second complaint accusing the F.B.I. of violating Trump’s privacy when it raided Mar-a-Lagoin 2022 for to search for classified documents. That claim also accused the Biden Justice Department of malicious prosecution (Gee, ya think?).

Naturally, the Biden Justice Department (which also had a conflict of interest, as it was unlikely to relish the prospect of admitting wrongdoing during the Presidential campaign, did nothing, leaving the matter to be resolved after the election. But Trump won, and many of his lawyers are now officials in the Justice Department. They have, essentially switched sides. Even the President, not known for his sensitivity to ethical matters, realizes the problem. “I have a lawsuit that was doing very well, and when I became president, I said, I’m sort of suing myself,” Trump has said, adding: “It sort of looks bad, I’m suing myself, right? So I don’t know. But that was a lawsuit that was very strong, very powerful.”

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Sen. Ernst’s Bill Is Exactly the Kind of Responsible Policy Changes Occur When a Government Stops Using “It’s Just a Drop In the Bucket!” As Its Operating Philosophy

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

And before you ask, no “It’s just a drop in the bucket!” is not currently included in the EA Rationalization List. But it will be….

Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa has submitted legislation, titled the “Presidential Allowance Modernization Act.” Under its reforms, former Presidents would receive a pension of $200,000 a year and a $200,000 allowance with cost of living adjustments every year. However, unlike the system currently in place, the allowance would be reduced if the former President earned more than $400,000 a year.

One is forced to ask, what took so long to come up with this change?

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Can Anyone Think of an Innocent, Ethical Explanation For USAID’s Giving $8.1 Million to Politico? Because I Can’t…..

/ Jack Marshall / 69 Comments

The howls of indignation over Trump and Marco Rubio pausing USAID grants rather than “gradually” examining all of the agency’s expenditures over time are particularly disingenuous. Such a stall will only mean that more taxpayer money will go out the metaphorical door for wasteful, ideological projects like what red-pilled former Rolling Stone pundit Matt Taibbi calls its “colossal library of crazy-ass contracts.” He cites the $39 million for “Gender Equality in Water, Power, and Transportation,” “Recognizing the Third Gender in Bangladesh,” “Ukrainian Resilience Through Fashion,” a “TransFormation Salon” and a pre-Taliban plan to help “Afghan Women Enter the Financial Sector,” but there are others that Elon Musk opening the ledgers on “the Matterhorn of suck that is USAID” (Taibbi again) have revealed.

Above we see the screen shot revealing that USAID gave over $8 million in grants during fiscal year 2024 to Politico, the online Axis news and punditry site. Politico is almost always critical of Trump, conservatives and Republicans and just as consistently a vocal ally of the “resistance,” Democrats and progressive policies and advocates.

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Ethics Dunce, Redux: Justice Clarence Thomas

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

In a new filing released today, Justice Clarence Thomas amended his financial disclosure for 2019 to note that he “inadvertently omitted” reporting two extravagant vacations paid for by conservative billionaire Harlan Crow, one to Indonesia and the other to the Bohemian Grove, an all-male retreat in northern California. Just slipped his mind! Hey, it could happen to anybody! Who hasn’t completely forgotten about a luxury trip they have enjoyed on the dime of a politically active tycoon? Heck, I know I just remembered one today, after I read this story. Well, it’s all better now; Thomas just retroactively corrected his lie of omission from five years ago.

Anyone who accepts this is ethically estopped from complaining about the White House editing Joe Biden’s blabberings to make him sound less like he belongs in a hospice.

Pro Publica correctly notes that last year, when these and other examples unusual largess from Crow—like paying for Thomas’s mother’s house—were revealed, Thomas’s “Justice Thomas’s lawyers issued a statement on the Justice’s behalf. saying that the allegations were untrue.

Like all lawyers, Supreme Court Justices are prohibited from lying in the course of their professional conduct. The prohibition on lawyer conduct is serious, but even more serious for judges, and extra-special, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious serious for the highest judges in the land.

Thomas is a disgrace, as I have said before.

But at least he never let his wife fly a 250-year-old historical flag that some idiots used to express their own political opinions…

Does Justice Merchan Have Conflict of Interest?

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

In August, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan M. Merchan, tasked with presiding over the criminal case against Donald Trump in Manhattan for 2016 “hush money payments” in violation of election laws, rejected Trump’s lawyers’ claims that the judge had disqualifying conflicts of interest and should recuse himself. The reasons for the recusal seemed a stretch at the time, easily the weakest being that, during the 2020 presidential campaign, Justice Merchan had donated the grand total of $15 to Joe Biden. Another was that the judge’s daughter, the president and chief operating officer of a digital marketing agency that has clients who are Democratic candidates, was obviously going to benefit financially Merchan’s decisions in the case.

Justice Merchan ruled, relying, he said, on the guidance of a state advisory committee on judicial ethics, that his impartiality could not “reasonably be questioned” based on “de minimus political contributions made more than two years ago” or his daughter’s business. The latter, he said, could not be substantially affected by the trial. Trump’s attorneys had “failed to demonstrate that there exists concrete, or even realistic reasons for recusal to be appropriate, much less required” because of his daughter’s activities.

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Your Fani Willis Fiasco Update…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

1. I had a long conversation with a close friend who is a retired lifetime federal prosecutor. She really detests Donald Trump, to the extent that she said she was initially “excited” about the Georgia case against him because, as a state prosecution, it would not be vulnerable to a presidential pardon. Now she says she is thoroughly disgusted with Willis, whom she termed an “idiot” for…

  • Hiring a lawyer to work on the case who would be using the fruits of his job to pay for benefits to her, what she called the equivalent of a kickback;
  • Having an intimate relationship with such a lawyer, which not only calls into question the reasons he was hired, but also her independent judgment regarding the case generally, since if he and she are benefiting from the case continuing, she sould not apply the required “independent judgment” to determine how to pursue the case or even whether to pursue it;
  • Doing this despite knowing that it would be a high profile case under constant scrutiny, requiring “Caesar’s wife” level, squeaky-clean management on her part;
  • Immediately “playing the “race card” as soon as her conflicts were raised in the court filing, when she knew or should have known that the ethics complaints have substance;
  • Creating a textbook “appearance of impropriety,” which as a government lawyer Willis had to know was taboo.

At very least, she agreed, Nathan Wade should have withdrawn from the case (or been removed by Willis) as soon as this controversy arose. That he has not, she said, proves that Willis is conflicted and her judgment is not trustworthy. My freind says the Georgia case is likely done-for, and that its demise will increase public skepticism about the legitimacy of the other cases being pursued against Trump. She also opines that even if Willis somehow is able to stay at the helm of the case, she is clearly such an incompetent that she will botch it in some other way.

I concur with all of the above.

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The Complete List Of Rationalizations To Excuse Justice Thomas’ Gross Betrayal Of Judicial Ethics, And Other Updates (Part I) [Revised and Expanded]

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Just in case you’re wondering, I stand by everything in my previous post about Justice Thomas’s unprecedented breach of judicial ethics and his obligations as a Supreme Court justice, except my belief that Thomas would resign, or be forced to. Not for the first time, I badly over-estimated the integrity of a public servant. Other points…

1. Above is Thomas’s statement this morning regarding the ProPublica report that he has been accepting lavish trips from conservative donor and billionaire Harlan Crow for decades. It is garbage, top to bottom:

  • The fact that the Thomases and the Crows are good friends or old friends is irrelevant, and is no defense.  Of course SCOTUS justices can have friends, and can socialize. However, many of the vacations the Crows took Clarence an Ginni on included other politically interested conservatives, who has access to Justice Thomas and an opportunity to pursue their interests with him as a captive audience. Moreover, one reason such situations suggest impropriety is the Cognitive Dissonance scale: gifts tend to raise the giver and what the giver is linked to on the scale of the receiver. This is why legislators and government employees are limited by laws in what kinds of gifts they receive. The legal ethics rules also caution against accepting expensive gifts from clients, because it might interfere with independent judgment, even though lawyers are supposed to already be on their clients’ sides.
  • “Family trips” is deceit. More than just the Crow family went on these trips. Thomas is obfuscating.
  • What “colleagues”? When was “early in his tenure”? Thomas joined the Court in 1991, well before the vacations with the Crows began. Are we supposed to believe he asked about gifts and junkets like these before they were offered? By colleagues, does he mean other justices? “I once asked somebody and they said it was okay” is a particularly unconvincing justification. 
  • Our first unethical rationalization, and it’s a lulu:#4 Marion Barry’s Misdirection, or “If it isn’t illegal, it’s ethical.” Thomas is saying that because no official standards prohibited what he did until recently, what he did was okay. Wrong! Rules, laws and standards don’t make unethical conduct wrong, ethical principles do. Thomas knew that the vacations violated well-accepted and near-universal principles of judicial ethics. He was and is a judge, and judges must avoid the appearance of impropriety and influence. For a Supreme Court justice to invoke the same corrupt logic as D.C.’s rogue mayor is disgusting and depressing.
  • It is false to say that the trips were not “reportable.” Of course they were reportable: Thomas deliberately chose not to report them.

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Van Jones’ Unforgivable Sin: Acting Like An American

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

 Two weeks ago Van Jones appeared on CNN’s “Inside Politics with John King” and “Anderson Cooper 360” to enthusiastically commend President Trump’s executive order regarding police reform.  This, of course, is high treason to the Democratic Party/”resistance”/ Mainstream media collective, to which Jones has triple membership. Nothing this President does, according to the Axis of Unethical Conduct’s by-laws, is ever anything better than stupid, dangerous,  or impeachable. The executive order was criticized as cynical and unproductive by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and “delusional” by the Color of Change, a racial spoils organization that Jones  co-founded in 2005.

I might have  given Jones some integrity points, had I not made up my mind about him long ago. Check the Ethics Alarms dossier on Jones: my 2014 description of his agenda as “fear-mongering, racial distrust and division” was and usually is fair. Then ” a knowledgeable White House source” revealed that Van Jones and California human rights attorney Jessica Jackson, who runs #cut50, a prison-reform group Jones also founded, worked with law enforcement officials and White House staffers (like the hated Jerod Kushner) to develop the policy measure. Jones was praising an action that he had been directly involved in, without informing the  CNN audience of  his conflict of interest. When he was accused of working on the order, Jones vehemently denied it.

His conduct and denials were dishonest and unethical, but it’s now apparent why Jones kept the secret he is now being attacked for. He knows his team. It’s not the conflict of interest; politicians and journalists don’t care about conflicts of interest unless they can be used to get rid of other politicians and journalists that they don’t like (“Emoluments!!!!”), and the average member of the public literally has no comprehension  of what  conflicts are and why they are unethical.

No, Van Jones knew he would be crucified—-and now is facing  cultural cancellation and shunning because he assisted the President of the United States! The Horror!

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Afternoon Ethics Alarms, 6/26/2020: Ethics Zoom!

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

This, as some of you might recall, is the logo for the old PBS kids series, the lively cast members of which are now middle-aged and arthritic. I don’t like to think about it…

I just did a dry run of an upcoming Zoom CLE conference, and other than the fact that I look like hell, I was impressed. If there’s any enthusiasm among readers, I am think hard about holding weekly ethics symposium using the technology. I can accommodate up to a hundred participants, and the time is unlimited (though their patience surely will be.) Let me know if you’re interested!

1. I’m used to cynical, but…The Democrats voting to not even debate the GOP Senate police reform bill was so openly partisan. The party didn’t went to pass anything that would give Republicans credit for addressing the police issue, and they are counting on Pelosi’s House Bill to be rejected by the Senate so they can have another election issue to energize their base. Mark Thiessen writes,

“What Democrats should be apologizing for was their shameful vote on the Senate floor Wednesday to kill Scott’s legislation — and with it any chance of passing police reform this year. Democrats knew exactly what they were doing. As Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), one of three members of the Democratic caucus who voted to advance the Scott bill, explained, “voting against it will end the discussion of this subject in the Senate for the foreseeable future, and leave us with nothing to show for all the energy and passion that has brought this issue to the forefront of public consciousness.””

To be fair, this is “do something” legislation that will not significantly reduce incidents of police misconduct toward blacks or whites. Situations like the Atlanta shooting, mysterious shootings like the traffic shot death of 25-year-old Hannah Fizer, who was white, and falsely reported shootings (“Hands up! Don’t shoot!”) will still occur, because of the nature of police work—unless police simply stop policing out of fear. I suspect that’s what will happen, and many more Americans will die under those conditions.

To date, ten unarmed black men have been killed by police this year.

2. Some call them the “1619”riots. This is the woman the New York Times allowed to lead its inflammatory and false slavery project:

On November 21, 1995, Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a letter to the editor of the Notre Dame University student newspaper, The Observer,to condemn a November 9, 1995 op-ed. She wrote in part,

“What responsible editor would print an article that applauds and dignifies the white race’s rape, plunder, and genocide of a whole race of people? I find it hard to believe that any member of the white race can have the audacity and hypocrisy to call any other culture savage. The white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world. Europeans have colonized and destroyed the indigenous populations of every continent of this planet. They have committed genocide against cultures that have never offended them in their greed and insatiable desire to control and dominate every non-white culture. Christopher Columbus and those like him were no different [than] Hitler. The crimes they committed were unnecessarily cruel and can only be described as acts of the devil…Africans had been to the Americas long before Columbus or any Europeans….It was not enough for whites to come to the Americas and learn, they looked upon the native people as inferior and a people to be annihilated. Their lasting monument was the destruction and enslavement of two races of people. Using Christianity as their excuse, the white race denied the native people their humanity.”

Bias? Racism? “Hate speech?” People are being fired, “canceled” and shunned in every segment of society for far less bigoted comments that are also older….but those victims of the new “Terror” are all white. The position at Ethics Alarms is that ancient excesses of rhetoric, including offensive jokes, should not be used to discredit anyone, but also that the leaders of the cancel culture should be held to their own rules. Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce, But He Doesn’t Care: Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr (R-NC)

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

I know this is unfair, but in almost every non-posed photo I found of Burr, he looks like he’s hiding something.

The Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Richard Burr,  sold off  between $628,000 and $1.72 million of his stock holdings on February 13 in 33 separate transactions. At the time, Burr had received the government’s most highly classified Wuhan virus briefings. About a week after Burr unloaded stocks that figured to be affected, the stock market began its dive and has lost about 30% of its value since

Today  NPR revealed  a secret recording from February 27 in which the Senator gave a GOP group at an exclusive social club a gloomy preview of the economic impact of the approaching pandemic. According to the NPR report, Burr told attendees of a business executives group luncheon held at the Capitol Hill Club:

“There’s one thing that I can tell you about this: It is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history … It is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.”

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