Watch Dogs Try to Make Sense of Trump’s Plans

Photo provided by Wikimedia Commons

Lawyers have been tasked with investigating Donald Trump’s possible conflicts of interest, struggling with a particular oversight system that is ineffective, disjointed and unnecessary. The various lawyers who are working outside and inside the government have a share of Trump’s ethics portfolio. However, no individual can see the full picture. This set up means that in most cases the lawyers are overlaying each other while potential conflict areas go uncovered.

There is no clear assignment of roles among these lawyers. This is problematic since there will be a significant amount of overlap. Maybe the bigger issue for the lawyers responsible for the president, business or the White House do have any conflict of interests, according Ronald Bishop at Drexel University.  However, in the case that the conflict of interest laws cannot be used on the president directly, something the lawyers near Trump note quickly that the controversies around the president business arrangements tend to bring the lawyers who are working on this issue a lot of political headaches.

However, the Chief Ethics Official for the government came to a conclusion that the senior adviser to the White House had been in violation of the warnings against misuse of certain positions. The president’s visit to his private club in South Florida for three consecutive weekends raised questions that Trump is giving members access to his government. Trump has handed over control of his company to a longtime Trump Organization executive and his two sons. Yet, legal documents show that Trump still holds significant power over the whole operation having the right to reorganize the whole arrangement, the aim of the trust is to keep all his assets together as per Kellner in his book American Nightmare Donald Trump, Media Spectacle, and Authoritarian Populism.

The vetting team is run by a group of lawyers including some from the White House counsel’s office and Trump’s organization. The government agents are given questions concerning the administration but crippled by the sheer scope of Trump’s business operations and the legal restrictions that come from their offices. The president’s pre-inauguration business case tended to spread all over 500 objects in which he was either the principle or the sole owner of what was not easy for any layman to understand. However, it turned out that the proper set up used by the president and his family is something of a maze.

Sorting that out fell into Trump’s organization which is a corporate lawsuit that has no significant ethical background, in which some people tend to worry since it might be unable to push the business to give the required information for assessing conflicts.

Leave a Reply