Outgoing ethics director: Ethics program ‘a very serious disappointment in the WH’

Walter Shaub, the Office of Government Ethics director who announced his resignation Thursday, said the current ethics program in the White House is a “serious disappointment.”

When asked on MSNBC Friday about the ethics program in the White House, Shaub said, “I have only got really good things to say about the ethics program that President Bush ran and the ethics program that President Obama ran.”{mosads}

President Trump’s White House, Shaub said, has been a “very serious disappointment.”

When pressed on whether top White House officials and the president are free from conflicts of interest in the White House, Shaub responded:”Well, no.”

“We’ve received very little information about what the individuals in the White House do on a day-to-day basis for a living. They’ve negotiated ethics agreements with them and they’ve refused to even let the Office of Government Ethics so much as see those ethics agreements,” Shaub said.

“We’ve asked for information, and it’s like pulling teeth. Weeks go by before we get answers in many cases,” he continued. “And after I issued a data call for all of the waivers and authorizations that had been issued at the end of April, they refused for over a month to answer any questions from my staff as to whether any individuals had received waivers, because they were still deciding whether they were gonna comply with that data call.”

Shaub will officially step down from the  OGE on July 19, according to his resignation letter sent Thursday.