We are so happy to see you here this afternoon. I am nicole austinhillery, director of the Brennan Center for office. We want to thank our friends here for cohosting this event with us this afternoon and being such a great partner for the Brennan Center for justice. On behalf of the Brennan Center we are pleased you joined us this afternoon for what we know will be an exciting and interesting conversation on president ial ethics law and this is a particularly good moment to have that discussion. The Brennan Center for those who dont know is a nonpartisan policy institute that seeks to improve our broken system of justice and democracy and we like to use the tools of advocacy, research, litigation and Strategic Communication to do just that. We work on what we think are very cutting edge issues like voting rights, money and politics, ethics, criminal justice reform, racial justice, fair courts and a host of other issues to do just that. Make our democracy and Justice System stronger and more effective for all americans. Please follow the Brennan Center if you dont already on facebook and twitter, check out our videos and podcasts on itunes, youtube and the multimedia section of brennancenter. Org. That said im pleased to introduce our moderator for todays program, kimberly atkins, chief washington reporter and Political Columnist for the Boston Herald, please join me in washington to welcome kimberly. Thank you. Donald trumps decision to keep control of his Business Empire displays conflict of interest is but one of a number of ethical controversies that have made headlines since Inauguration Day a year ago. An informal guardrail that constrain selfdealing by those in power fall by the wayside. What can be done to shore up federal ethics laws to give the Public Confidence that their leaders will put the interests of the American People first . What are the most significant gaps that exist in our system of federal ethics regulation . What are the special challenges that accompany any effort to regulate the president s conduct in office and what are the most promising ideas for reform . Those other questions we are tackling today with our esteemed panel of guests including Kathleen Clark from Washington University. Walter shaub, ethics director of the Campaign Legal center and former director of the office of government ethics and daniel weiner, senior of the Brennan Center for justice at nyu school of law. Welcome to the Brennan Center of justice at nyu dc. Okay. So, my name is kimberly atkins, im a Political Columnist and reporter for the Boston Herald. I want to start our discussion and note in the beginning we will have time at the end for questions so hold them tight and we will come to that a little later but i want to start out talking about the background of federal ethics laws and how do they apply to the president. That is a good question. Some federal ethics laws apply to the president , one of the most important, which is the federal prohibition on conflict of interest does not and that exemption dates back to the late 80s although it was implied before. What is interesting of course, most folks know this is historically, president s notwithstanding that they were not prohibited from having conflicts of interests took voluntary steps, sometimes quite elaborate steps to avoid them nonetheless and usually that took the form, my copanelist will correct me if i am wrong, worked in this space longer than i have but usually took the form either of the types of assets they held were submitted to diversified mutual funds and Bank Accounts and that sort of thing or placing other types of things in a blind trust which was shielded from their control and increasingly their knowledge. That is a key element of federal ethics that does not apply to the president. Of the rules including bribery, no one has ever suggested they dont. We have ever proven that because the president has never been prosecuted. They have to disclose something but there are significantly fewer constraints than virtually every other federal official other than the Vice President. Talk a little bit about the rules that were put in place to complement and supplement the existing Legal Framework when it comes to regulation, regulating ethics. With regard to the president , it is true the president is not covered by primary, a conflict of interest statute but the way i look at that is the law doesnt impose a criminal penalty for the president s conflict of interest but that doesnt mean as the president asserted a year ago that a president cant have conflicts of interest. The president obviously and have a conflict of interest because anything that creates the financial interest that runs contrary to the duties of your position and a president can certainly do that and we have seen this president to that. Not entirely true that no laws cover the president with regard to conflicts of interest or ethics in general, technically the president is covered by the ethics gift rules although oge created an exemption, an exception for the president that allows him to accept certain gifts. Interestingly in the past year it was effective january 1st but was approved and issued as a final ruling prior to that in 2016, creating a new requirement that you should consider, if you can accept a gift because an exception applies should you accept it and would it create a concern on the part of a reasonable person with knowledge of the relevant facts as to whether or not this would impede your impartiality in decisionmaking or lead you to give greater access to someone. I dont suspect for a second that is actually being applied but it should be and Good Government groups and reporters and the public should be asking if they see them accept a gift what was your analysis and applying those factors. Another obscure provision that applies to the president is in 2012 Congress Passed the stock act, stop trading on congressional knowledge act and it was somewhat incorrectly reported that the law had been rescinded. It is not been rescinded. It is in place. When transparency was curtailed and rolled back a bit but the law was originally response to a 60 minutes piece that suggested members of congress were profiting from their position by engaging in trades around the time laws were being passed and other decisions being made and it was initially intended to apply only to the legislative branch and president obama called on congress to shame them in a state of the union speech then you should pass it. That prompted a reaction where they extended coverage to the executive branch and said we will pass it all right and it became like a Christmas Tree of people hanging ornaments on it because there were 30 different amendments added in the final two weeks or so. One of the provisions defined the president as an employee meaning all of the new restrictions imposed on an employee apply to the president and one of the restrictions was the requirement under section 17 to recuse from any particular matter affecting financial interests of anyone you have an arrangement with for future employment or compensation or negotiating for one of those and that is interesting because it imposes a recusal requirement on the president and as we will discuss later, that is the subject of constitutional debate whether or not congress can impose a recusal requirement on the president but in fact they have just hasnt been challenged because no one tried to insert its coverage. But that was a crossing of a threshold and i dont know they did it deliberately but as with any legislative history you have to assume they knew what they were doing. A bold assumption. Lets talk about what is missing, some of the loopholes in these rules as you lay them out. Give is your view of that. I want to emphasize the countrys first conflict of interest laws is apply, theres conflict of interest found in the United States constitution. The emoluments clause and domestic emoluments clause and those indicate the president or any Government Official is prohibited from accepting something of value from a Foreign Government and that has been the subject of some litigation but what i think that represents is our framers recognize the danger Government Officials including the president could be influenced by money or anything of value they received. In terms of exceptions, problems that need to be filled i think what dan identified, the fact that in 1989 congress amended the criminal financial conflict of interest statute so that it exempted the president and the Vice President from its reach. That was a mistake and if we go back a couple more decades to 1962 when president kennedy was submitting a comprehensive set of Ethics Reforms before Congress President kennedy included an exemption for the president and Vice President , congress rejected it. From 1962 on, imposed on the president and Vice President financial conflict statute, that is one thing, congress, when we get a congress that cares again about our founding principles and conflict of interests and protecting the public trust, when we get that congress i think that Congress Needs to reenact the financial criminal conflict of interest provision on the president is the other thing i want to mention, another problem in the conflict of interest standards or ethics standards, this is a process issue. Government officials, highlevel officials are required by statute to fill out somewhat detailed forms about their financial interests but the statute is that it has been interpreted so that if the Government Official has a business, the official does not need to disclose the debt and financial relationship of that company but we have a president who has hundreds of llcs and the office of government ethics has interpreted the statute, the disclosure statute, he is not required to disclose Financial Relationships of those llcs including the death coat of those llcs those companies so we have Financial Disclosure laws adequate for many of the people in the room or someone like myself but theyre not adequate to deal with someone who is using, has their own company because it has been interpreted not to require disclosure. For someone like trump, Jared Kushner, we need to change the law so we can get visibility into the Financial Connections including the debt of their own companies. In addition to not having to disclose the debt, the other wacky think about disclosure, we have discussed this, if you ever see they disclosed in very broad ranges like 5 million to 25 million which for conflict of interest purposes just to see what your asset is may be adequate but one of the things we look that is if you look at other countries, italy, it wasnt Silvio Berlusconi was necessarily directly taking Government Action to benefit his media empire although he was some have said but it was a pattern of rent seeking businesses and sectors of industry buying advertising at inflated prices at his companies and increasing their value and that was the primary way he enriched himself from being Prime Minister of italy and we saw the same thing with the husband and wife president of argentina who owns a chain of hotels. When you have these broad ranges it obscures the extent to which certain assets might be increasing in value for reasons other than the market. Mara lago for instance made 7 million more in the most recent period than it did before the president became president. He disclosed that on his report, that is a good example, made mara lago a more attractive place to play and be a member now that it is run by the president of the united dates. That is something the forms would not necessarily reveal. One step back from this point and post to the panel, why should we care about these issues, why do we care about conflicts of interest. There are a lot of supporters of the president to say is a good businessman, he has the right to make money, we knew he was a businessman when he was elected so identify why we have these conflict of interest laws and why we care about them. If i could go back to a couple points. Kathleen knows she and i disagree on one point but it is a cheerful professional disagreement. I dont agree the 1962 law applied to the president. It is not a matter of going back to what was prior to the 1989 amendment. I it was understood at the time the criminal conflict of interest statute did not apply to the president and in 1974 Lauren Silberman writing on behalf of the department of justice wrote an opinion articulating that and that opinion was cited again in 1983 and by 1989 when they put that in there was some nervousness at the tail end of the Reagan Administration about consequences for some alleged issues but i dont think anyone seriously thought at the time that they were changing it, they thought they were codifying it. In terms of liabilities for companies i am the one who certified the president s Financial Disclosure and stand by that. It was compliant to the extent that he disclosed. Theres no way they could know that. I agree with the other two panelists that the laws are inadequate to deal with the situation we are in terms of disclosure but the treatment of privately Held Companies, you dont have to disclose their liabilities or Business Partners is consistent with the rest of the application of statute because for instance if you hold stock in cocacola or exxon or any other large publicly traded company you are not necessarily going to know as a random person who called of your broker and said to buy shares of cocacola and 50 shares of exxon what the Companies Liabilities are or who is affiliated. So i think we are seeing, privately Held Companies and privately held Family Companies like Donald Trumps familys company, Jared Kushners familys companies and the nominee to be the head of noah in the department of commerce his name is barry myers who is coming from accuweather which is a very closely held Family Company and though this is a new problem we have not had a lot of experience dealing with and the law hasnt caught up with the fact that now we have Public Officials with these privately Held Companies and in terms of the ranges, i look at it as a technician. Im not sure i agree we need to break the ranges into more pieces, particularly on the value side because if you have a one dollar asset it is still a conflict of interest unless theres an exemption that applies. It might be more important on the income side. If you are seeing a greatly increased revenue stream that might be more indicative, the valuation, i take your point it may be less important. We stripped publicly traded companies out of that because im not sure theres any purpose in knowing dividends from a publicly traded company but these privately Held Companies you can see fluctuations and want to know what that is about but this goes back to why does this matter . Most basic core, a question of corruption, whether or not somebody is misusing or abusing the authority entrusted to them for their own personal gain or the personal gain of some other private individual or company, if we have people going into government to enrich themselves or enrich others by using governmental authority, i dont mean collecting their salary but using Government Authority entrusted by the people to be used for their benefit but use that for your own benefit, then that calls into question the legitimacy of government as a concept much less in the individual case. That is the hallmark of the countries that we label banana republics where leaders can just help themselves. There are rumors Vladimir Putin has used all his authoritarian power to perhaps become a the richest man in the world or one of them. And why are we entrusting authority to people but even beyond the actual misuse is, in a civilized modern western society the sense that we shouldnt even have to ask the question. The burden should be on the Government Official to take whatever actions they can to show us that there is no remaining conflict of interest and that is as it should be because the public cant have access to enough information to know the link between a financial interest and a decision is very hard to draw and so in many cases we find ourselves highlighting the smaller violations that are the canary in the coal mine that tell us there is a broader ross going on, but in realit