conflicts of interest
North Carolina’s Conflicted, Disloyal, Unethical Attorney General, Roy Cooper
A candidate masquerading as a lawyer…
Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s elected Attorney General, has so many conflicts of interest that he can’t credibly do his job in an ethical manner. Fortunately for him doing his job ethically seems to hold no interest for him.
To start with, he is an announced political opponent of the current Republican governor, Pat McCrory. This situation is not unique, but if an Attorney General is going to do his job ethically, for remember he is the state’s lawyer, he has to make an effort to put his political interests aside and not allow them to interfere with his duty to represent his client the state, whose voters have made McCrory its top decision-maker.
Cooper, however, isn’t making any such effort. House Bill 2, a state law passed last week that bars local governments from enacting nondiscrimination protections for the LGBT community, is anathema to Cooper’s constituency, so he is refusing to defend it in court against a federal lawsuit. If he were a private attorney whose beliefs rendered it impossible for him to represent his client, Cooper would have to resign. Since he is elected, he need not do that, but he can’t actively interfere with his client’s legal needs either. His proper course under the legal ethics rules governing all lawyers would be to find an outside counsel to do his job in this case, since he is incapable of doing it, and to defend the law.
Instead, Cooper is actively undermining his client’s legitimate objectives. Cooper said in a news conference that the law is a “national embarrassment” and it “will set North Carolina’s economy back if we don’t repeal it.” That’s the candidate talking, not the state’s lawyer, and thus the state’s lawyer is engaged in a bright-line breach of loyalty by talking like that in public. His duty, and his only ethical option, is to shut up. He may not be able to support his client’s objectives, but he absolutely must not impede them.
Cooper has even gone beyond that ethical violation to a massive conflict of interest breach. Instead of defending McCrory, the Board of Governors and the others being sued in the federal lawsuit, Cooper has announced that he will defend the two LGBT people and the lesbian professor bringing the lawsuit against the state! Continue reading
The News Media Signals That It Intends to Have Biased Coverage, And Journalism Ethics Be Damned
“Wait—why would anyone think Obama’s 2012 campaign spokesperson wouldn’t be capable of fair objective analysis of the 2016 campaign?”
As Erik Wemple, the new media blogger of the Washington Post, reveals, NBC intended to sign on an irredeemably conflicted and biased “political analyst” for the upcoming campaign and election until her ongoing conflict of interest was made too obvious to hide. When Politico’s Mike Allen pointed pointed out that this announcement from the network…
“Stephanie Cutter has joined NBC News and MSNBC as a Political Analyst. She will contribute exclusively on a range of topics across all platforms including Meet the Press, TODAY, Nightly and MSNBC.”
…was made the same DAY a New York Times story, “Obama Mobilizes Campaign Veterans to Push for Court Nominee,” by Michael D. Shear and Eric Lipton reported…
“[Stephanie] Cutter … will oversee the efforts by the new group, to be called the Constitutional Responsibility Project. Anita Dunn, the former White House communications director, is handling the news media, along with Amy Brundage, a veteran Obama aide. Also involved are Julianna Smoot, the chief fund-raiser for Mr. Obama’s campaigns; Paul Tewes, Mr. Obama’s top field operative in 2008; and Katie Beirne Fallon, the president’s last legislative director.”
…even the shamelessly partisan NBC had to backtrack. Were they really willing to promote and pay a previous Obama campaign spokesperson as an objective and independent analyst while she was being paid to promote a politically charged Obama agenda item? Apparently not—not yet, anyway. This is, of course, a textbook, unresolvable conflict of interest, though NBC avoided that clarifying phrase. The official announcement from the network cancelling the deal with Cutter before the ink was dry on her contract stated:
“We look forward to Stephanie’s insights on our air during this election year, but she will appear as a guest and not as an analyst due to her leadership role in the battle over the President’s Supreme Court nomination.”
This is a porous band-aid on a gushing ethics wound on the journalism establishment, but good enough, I’m sure, for either the average inattentive TV viewer or the partisan Democrat who thinks, for example, that it’s fine to have Democratic operative Donna Brazile posing regularly as an objective commentator on ABC and CNN. Wemple even seems to praise NBC for making the call, even though it is outrageous that any network would dare to hire a demonstrably dishonest Democratic Party hack like Cutter and pronounce her capable of competent analysis, much less objectivity. Continue reading
The Ethics Of Judges In Love
When attorney Joe Foley represented a client in a matter before Judge Scott Drazewski in early 2011, he was unaware that the married judge was involved a year-long secret romantic affair with Judge Rebecca Foley, the attorney’s wife.
Now both Illinois judges have been disciplined by state legal ethics authorities for failing to reveal their romantic relationship and violating multiple ethics rules as a result. The ethics commission imposed a four-month unpaid suspension on Drazewski for “egregious” judicial ethics violations, and censured Judge Foley for assisting, aiding, abetting, and not reporting his violation or their affair. Continue reading
The Manager, The Hot Reporter, Conflicts and Professionalism
It’s nice of my favorite baseball team to supply me with ethics stories, don’t you think? This one has management ethics, relationship ethics, journalism ethics, sexual harassment and professionalism.
The Boston Globe reported last week that Boston Red Sox manager John Farrell and Comcast SportsNet New England reporter Jessica Moran, who covered the team, were romantically involved. Moran promptly resigned. This quickly degenerated into the usual ethically muddled discussion by members of the public who watch George Stephanopoulos interview Hillary Clinton and see nothing amiss, and have been so badly taught the ethics basics that they couldn’t identify a conflict of interest if they tripped on one, and members of the news media, who, if anything, are worse. Among the questions being floated, and their somehow elusive answers…
These are consenting adults. Why aren’t they free to have a relationship?
Because they are professionals, with special duties to their constituencies and stakeholders, and the relationship between a reporter and her subject undermines independence, loyalty, trust and competence.
Why is it always the woman the one who has to lose her job?
It isn’t. The journalist has to lose her job, because the journalist breached the basic ethics of the profession. The baseball manager’s conduct is wrong, but comparatively tangential to his duties at worst. It is still seriously unethical, however, and undermines team culture and the status of other women who have duties involving the team. Farrell, by dating Moran, was sending a message to his players and other team personnel that these women are legitimate targets for sexual courtship rather than workplace colleagues. The relationship may have constituted third party sexual harassment, making other women feel as if team leadership had sent the message that they weren’t to be taken seriously as professionals.
Why is everyone making a big deal about this? She’s a beautiful young woman, covering a team of men. Isn’t this to be expected? Continue reading
Encore! Presidents Day Ethics: The Presidents of the United States on Ethics and Leadership
It’s President’s Day, and I see that it has been five years since the most popular Ethics Alarms President’s Day post was published. That one, from 2011, reminds us of the ethics wisdom and leadership acumen of the remarkable men who have served their country in the most challenging, difficult, and ethically complicated of all jobs, the U.S. Presidency.
In the middle of a campaign season littered with some disturbingly unethical candidates, it seems especially appropriate to re-post that entry now….with some updates. In 2011, I left out three Presidents, including the current one. Now all are represented, most of them well.
So…
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Presidents of the United States of America:
George Washington: “I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.”
John Adams: “Because power corrupts, society’s demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases.”
Thomas Jefferson: “On great occasions every good officer must be ready to risk himself in going beyond the strict line of law, when the public preservation requires it; his motives will be a justification…”
James Madison: “No government any more than any individual will long be respected without being truly respectable.”
James Monroe: “The best form of government is that which is most likely to prevent the greatest sum of evil.”
John Quincy Adams: “Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.”
Andrew Jackson: “One man with courage makes a majority.” (Attributed)
Martin Van Buren: “No evil can result from its inhibition more pernicious than its toleration.”
William Henry Harrison: “There is nothing more corrupting, nothing more destructive of the noblest and finest feelings of our nature, than the exercise of unlimited power.” Continue reading
Rep. Alan Grayson, Incivility, Predicting Unethical Conduct…and Donald Trump
It should come as no surprise to anyone that Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fl.) is under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for serious ethics violations. This was pre-ordained by the proclivities he has shown throughout his political career. In his case, the primary tell is his complete lack of civility, which is symptomatic of a crucial respect deficit. Those who do not regard displaying respect for colleagues, fellow citizens, political adversaries and, more broadly, societal standards of fairness and decency as an important behavioral mandate cannot be trusted to respect any other ethical values either. Occasionally one will find someone who deals in insults and personal denigration who is otherwise ethical, just as one will occasionally encounter a baby goat with two heads, but it is rare indeed. If you go through life avoiding uncivil, verbally abusive people like the plague (indeed, such people carry the plague of de-civilization) you will not miss out on very many good companions, and you will spare yourself a lot of misery as well the danger of personal corruption.
Grayson is without question the most uncivil, rudest, least professional member of Congress. I was amused to find that I had mentioned him in a post from 2010 about how many ethics scandals were predictable, given the past conduct of their principle actors. Once Tom DeLay was out of Congress, Alan Grayson was easily the most likely candidate for a scandal, because the man has no ethics alarms. In my very first post about Grayson, I wrote (in 2009),
“Grayson is the Congressman whose explanation of the GOP position on health care was that “they want you to die.” He said that Dick Cheney speaks with “blood dripping from his teeth.” His mode of debate and persuasion, in other words, is insult and hyperbole. Respect for opposing views: zilch. Civility grade: F… He has endorsed unethical rules and plays by them…”
That post was about Grayson trying to get the Justice Department to shut down a website that mocked him. Yes, he doesn’t believe in freedom of speech, either, when he is the target of insults rather than the generator of them.
All of which led me to react with a smile and a yawn when it was revealed that the disgusting congressman, now running for the U.S. Senate–Sure! Why not?—has been secretly moonlighting as a hedge fund manager. It sounds like a Saturday Night Live skit: “By day, a Wall Street-bashing, 1% hating, populist Democratic Congressman! By night, a wheeling and dealing hedge-fund manager!”
Do I need to explain why this is a slam-dunk conflict of interest with the appearance of impropriety? I don’t think so. It also smells of insider trading and using information privy to elected officials for personal gain. On the other side, he used his position as a U.S. House of Representatives member to attract clients.
From the New York Times (it’s me breaking in a couple of times): Continue reading
The Seventh Annual Ethics Alarms Awards, Part II: The Worst of Ethics 2015
Ethics Corrupters of the Year
(Awarded to the unethical public figure whose prominence, popularity and success most corrupts the public’s ethical values)
A Tie: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Nobody else is close.
I’m sorry that these two are so dominating the awards. They also dominated the posts last year. If they dominate the awards next year, God Save The United States of America…
Double Standard Of The Year
The deference accorded to anti-white protesters on dozens of college campuses, not just by spineless administrators but much of the news media. Similar protests, conduct and rhetoric by white students would be immediately condemned for what it would be: blatant racism.
Lie of the Year
Hands Up! Don’t shoot! The lie was uttered in 2014, but acquired new status after the Justice Department unexpectedly and definitively determined that the evidence did not support the inflammatory myth that Mike Brown was shot dead in Ferguson while trying to surrender to Officer Wilson. Never mind: the lie is part of the manifesto of Black Lives Matter and similar groups; it is still alluded to by activists and shameless politicians; it still divides the nation and focuses hate on police departments; and it has contributed to getting police officers killed while making communities more vulnerable to crime. It may be the Lie of the Decade.
Uncivil U.S. Official of the Year
Justice Antonin Scalia, who crossed all lines of judicial restraint, collegiality and civility when he excoriated his colleague, Justice Kennedy, who was the fifth vote in the majority of SCOTUS’s ruling that same-sex marriage was a Constitutional right no state could deny, with this comment in a footnote:
“If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: ‘The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,’ I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.”
——U.S. Supreme Court Justice Scalia,
The Jesse Jackson Award
(For the Year’s Worst Amateur Diplomat)
Barack Obama. I know, this is snarkier than I like to be in these awards, but the signature diplomatic measure of the past year, the astounding, one-sided, dangerous and Munich-like deal with Iran, could only be the product of an ideological tyro placing wishes and hopes over diplomatic responsibility, and not for the first time. For most Presidents, trading dangerous terrorists for a deserter would be nadir. History has seen many tragedies seeded by world leaders with no diplomatic skills: the disastrous Treaty of Versailles, Potsdam, and the treaty that this one most resembles, negotiated by the hapless Neville Chamberlain. We can only hope that the worst case scenario doesn’t materialize, but if it does not, it will be moral luck.
Most Unethical Sports League
The NFL, for the third year in a row. “Concussion,” Tom Brady, Deflategate, more evidence that NFL players are slowly killing themselves with brain damage, Johnny Manziel. What a great sport pro football is.
Sports Cheat of the Year
Tom Brady, New England Patriots ball-deflating quarterback. Brady eventually avoided punishment because the NFL botched both its investigation and its imposition of penalties, but his smirking, cynical comments about the incident made it clear that he thinks cheating is no big deal, and most of his fans agree.
Not surprisingly, Brady supports Donald Trump.
Unethical Lawyers of the Year
Law Firm Division: Lawyers Stephen Diaco, Robert Adams and Adam Filthaut of the Florida firm Adams & Diaco were found to have “maliciously” set up the drunken-driving arrest of their opposing counsel in a high-profile defamation trial. The plot involved a comely paralegal and a cooperative DUI cop. Last I checked, it looked like all three lawyers would be disbarred for life.
Scary Lawyer Division: California lawyer Douglas Crawford held a can of pepper spray a yard from the face of the opposing lawyer saying, “I will pepper-spray you if you get out of hand.” Then the lawyer pointed a stun gun at Traver’s head and said, “If that doesn’t quell you, this is a flashlight that turns into a stun gun.” To show he wasn’t kidding, Crawford discharged the stun gun the startled lawyer’s face.
Hard-working Lawyer Division: Massachusetts lawyer, Karen Andrade, was charged with prostitution after a police investigated a report by a suspicious neighbor and found online reviews of both the lawyer’s legal services and her escort services
Celebrity Lawyer Division: Michael Cohen, one of Donald Trump’s lawyers, told the Daily Beast that it was legally impossible for a man to rape his wife. He was only a couple of decades and many court cases behind on his research. That piece of legal scholarship came after he had threatened the website’s staff in language usually associated with loan sharks and pimps.
Unethical Prosecutor of the Year
Ethics Alarms’ All-Time Greatest Hits
I am listing these because one of the past posts that keep drawing readers is going nuts today: the 2013 essay about the horrible Wanetta Gibson, who sent Brian Banks, a young man with a bright future to prison by falsely accusing him of rape when she was 15. If anyone has any idea why this would be, let me know; as far as I can find out, there are no new developments in the case.
It is gratifying that so many Ethics Alarms posts continue to find new readers. Here are the top ten that have “legs,” and my assessment of why.
1. The Rationalizations List. That’s no surprise, since I link to it so frequently, and it is also frequently updated.
2. Wanetta Gibson Is Even Worse Than We Thought
3.The Amazing Mouthwash Deception: Helping Alcoholics Relapse For Profit. I am proud of this one. The use of mouthwash by alcoholics is epidemic, yet now, as in 2010 when I wrote this, almost nobody who isn’t a drunk is likely to know it. This makes it easy for closeted alcoholics to hide their illness, and continue to harm themselves by gulping 54 proof liquor out of various convenient containers or their caps, which are coincidentally shaped like shot glasses. Incredibly, the Ethics Alarms post is still one of the few references on this problem on the web. As you will read, I think the makers of mouthwash intentionally keep it this way, because the alcoholic market is huge.
I regularly receive thanks from family members of alcoholics, who tell me that reading this post led to their discovering that a loved oned had relapsed. Continue reading
Observations On The New Hampshire Democratic Candidates Debate
I’m sure that there are loyalists who just love watching Clinton or Sanders no matter what they are doing and saying, just as I will watch even a lousy Danny Kaye movie just to see Danny Kaye. But wow, I’d really like to see the results of a post-mortem on the brain of anyone who said last night’s debacle was anything but excruciating and depressing. If I were a Democrat, I’d be on a three-day drunk after last night. I’m not, and I’m still considering it. This was easily the worst presidential candidates debate I’ve ever seen, read about or analyzed.
Why? Well, how many other debates had two candidates, their faces contorted in anger, shouting at each other (Bernie is always shouting, really) when they hardly disagree about anything of substance? How often is it so obvious that one candidate isn’t trying to win, and avoids every opening and opportunity to take down his opponent? As I have said before, if I had contributed to Sanders, I’d demand my money back. I thought losing the pathetic Martin O’Malley would be a plus, but it wasn’t. Focusing only on the irredeemably absurd Sanders and the unquestionably corrupt Clinton just made the question more vivid: after two and a half centuries as a major party, how could the Democratic Party have so little respect for the American public and so little devotion to its role in selection of the Presidency to leave us with this?
Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, here are specific observations. The transcript is here.
1 More than any debate in 2016, this was performed as if only hard-left loyalists were watching, and the moderators behaved that way as well. Agenda items like the minimum wage and “equal pay for jobs” were tossed off as shorthand and givens, without any fear that anyone would say, “Hey, wait a minute..” Yesterday, for example, data was revealed showing that in six major cities that enacted large minimum wage hikes last year, employment has suffered—as predicted by anyone without “progressive” blinders on. That would have been a good question to raise, but nobody was there to raise it. Rachel Maddow? Right.
2. The debate was deja vu, and little else. How many times do we need to hear Sanders’ generalized rap about the economy being rigged, Wall Street being a den of thieves, and single-payer health care being obviously the way to go because “everybody does it”? How many times do we have to hear that Hillary is going to “improve [Obamacare]… build on it, get the costs down, get prescription drug costs down” without being given a clue how, and without anyone even asking the question? How is she going to do all this without having the country “plunge back into a contentious national debate that has very little chance of succeeding.” What does that mean, Hillary? Funny, I thought debate was how policies get made in a democracy. Please explain: what is your substitute for democracy? Don’t “progressives'” have a totalitarian ethics alarm any more?
3. Clinton’s responses to the Sanders accusation that she’s not progressive enough—the Democratic doppleganger of the annoying and equally silly Republican accusation that a candidate isn’t a “true conservative,” were something to behold:
- “I am a progressive who gets things done.” A bumper sticker slogan, and by the way, what things? Honestly, I can’t name any at all: she was a Senator, didn’t create any major legislation, and wasn’t a successful Secretary of State. What things does she get done? Again, Bernie won’t ask a real question….but then, he hasn’t accomplished anything either. Later, to prove her credentials in getting things done, Hillary talked, as she always does, about “fighting” for this or that, even going back to her days with the Children’s Defense fund and the DOA Hillarycare bill that crashed and burned in her husband’s first term. A 69-year-old candidate for President who actually “gets things done” wouldn’t have to dig this deep—and a candidate trying to defeat her wouldn’t hesitate to say so.
- She actually compared Sanders’ criticism of her progressive bona fides with not regarding a liberal Democratic Senator as progressive enough when that Senator, Paul Wellstone, has been dead since 2002, and Sanders has never mentioned him during the campaign at all! This was a straw man for the ages.
4. Having finished that pointless “debate,” they moved on to whether Hillary was the “establishment.” This sounded like a an acid-flashback from 1968, but never mind: here was Hillary’s rebuttal:
“Senator Sanders is the only person who I think would characterize me, a woman running to be the first woman president, as exemplifying the establishment.”
Sexist, insulting, tribal and dumb. Merely having two X chromosomes means that you are by definition not part of the existing power structure even when you have been part of that power structure for decades? This is just a dog-whistle to vagina-voters, who themselves are a disgrace to democracy, fairness and civic responsibility. What is it about Hillary Clinton’s career since hooking up with Bill that has shown her to be a power-seeker and broker distinguishable in conduct and motives from a man? Oh, that’s right: when her husband serially abused women as well as betraying their marriage, she sided with..him, against them.
5. Ethics alarm: “The reality is that we have one of lowest voter turnouts of any major country on earth because so many people have given up on the political process,” says Sanders. Sanders really does believe that when the United States is different from all those other less successful countries, it must be wrong. This “reality” just cynical poison that Sanders likes to say, even though it contradicts his own rhetoric. If Obama is such a great President, wasn’t he elected over Romney and McCain? Doesn’t Bernie think that makes a difference, and that the difference was votes? The GOP Congress he and Hillary are complaining about was elected when Democrats stayed home and Republicans came out in force, was it not? If the impression that their participation makes no difference is wrong, as it is, why does Sanders keep citing it as if he agrees? What does “so many people have given up on the political process” mean? Is he really attacking democracy itself? Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 