Timothy L. O'Brien, Columnist

The Ethics Official Dogging Trump Is Just Doing His Job

Walter Shaub, who runs the Office of Government Ethics, is being aggressive about the president-elect's conflicts of interest. He's not being partisan.

January 13, 2017 at 6:02 PM UTC

By Timothy L. O'Brien

Timothy L. O'Brien is senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. A former editor and reporter for the New York Times, he is author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.”

One family, many conflicts.
Photographer: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images

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Two days after Donald Trump unveiled a conflicts-of-interest plan that does little to create a meaningful barrier between his own potential financial opportunism and White House policymaking, Republicans in the House of Representatives have targeted the federal agency charged with … wait for it, wait for it … monitoring presidential ethics.

Walter Shaub, who runs the Office of Government Ethics, had the poor judgment on Wednesday to label Trump's plan as "meaningless" and beneath "the standards that the best of his nominees are meeting and that every president in the last four decades have met."