Head of ethics office revealed as Obama donor

Washington Free Beacon:
Director of the Office of Government Ethics Walter M. Shaub donated to President Obama before his appointment and defended Hillary Clinton’s decision to not disclose paid speeches to the Clinton Foundation while she was secretary of state.

Shaub, the head of the little-known ethics office, has been on the attack against President-elect Donald J. Trump for months.

Shaub has called Trump’s plan to sign over control of his business to his sons “meaningless,” and engaged in tweet storms from the official ethics Twitter account encouraging Trump to divest.
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Shaub struck a different tone when testifying before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in December 2015, when he was asked about Secretary Clinton’s failure to disclose six-figure dollar speeches her husband gave to foreign governments and donors while they had interests before the State Department.

“The statute is a very long, very detailed statute,” he told Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah) when defending the speeches as allowed under ethics rules.

“Why don’t we pursue maximum disclosure of anything that could be potentially relevant or interesting to anyone? It’s simply because we’re a nation of laws and OGE is specifically regulated by an extremely detailed, highly prescriptive statute,” Shaub said. “Congress left us almost no discretion in terms of interpreting this statute. We apply it uniformly to everyone across the board.”

Shaub said it was satisfactory to not disclose the speeches—which totaled $26.4 million to the Clinton Foundation from corporations, foreign donations, and universities—because Bill Clinton was acting as an “agent” for a charity.

The speeches included $500,000 Bill Clinton received for remarks before a Kremlin-tied investment bank in Moscow in 2010, while the Russians were negotiating to acquire a uranium company full of Clinton Foundation donors. The Uranium One deal was signed off by Hillary Clinton’s State Department, giving Russia control of 20 percent of uranium production capacity in the United States.
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He has sounded like a Democrat partisan all along and it is about time that someone did some reporting on his ethical judgments.

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