This GOP-Backed Law Forbids Donald Trump From Using Presidency For Personal Profit
Uh-oh.
12/13/2016 05:10 pm ET
Christina Wilkie
White House Correspondent, The Huffington Post
Paul Blumenthal
Money in Politics Reporter, The Huffington Post
President-elect Donald Trump’s business empire represents an unprecedented source of conflicts of interest between his presidential duties and the hundreds of private companies he controls, which he has said he will not sell and will leave to his sons to run. Luckily for Trump, the president of the United States is exempt from most of the conflict of interest rules that govern other federal employees.
“In theory, I can be president of the United States and run my business 100 percent,” Trump bragged to The New York Times in November.
But a 2012 law called the STOCK Act could throw a wrench in Trump’s plan. A section of that law states that “no executive branch employee may use nonpublic information derived from [or acquired through] their position as an executive branch employee as a means for making a private profit.”
“The STOCK Act bars the President from: using nonpublic information for private profit,” the independent Office of Government Ethics, which handles executive branch ethics issues, wrote in a Monday letter to Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.).
The measure was originally designed to apply only to members of Congress. But Republicans — annoyed that it covered the GOP-controlled House and Senate but not the Obama administration — made sure to extend it to the executive branch, including the president and vice president.
Some 232 Republicans in the House and 44 in the Senate voted for the bill. Just four Republicans opposed it.
“Republicans in Congress thought, ‘What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,’ and they fought to make sure the president and the vice president were subject to all the provisions of the bill,” said Craig Holman, a lobbyist at the nonprofit government watchdog Public Citizen, which helped draft the law. “Today the STOCK Act is one of the few government ethics laws that fully applies to the president and the vice president.”
more:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-private-profit-stock-act_us_585068c2e4b0e411bfd42094?
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