Clinton, Trump face fresh scrutiny on ethics
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s allies often tout his record on ethics and transparency in his White House.
He limited hires of federal lobbyists, and he barred them from funding his campaigns and inaugural events. He also broke new ground by publicly releasing the logs that record who visits to the White House.
But it’s not clear that either candidate vying to succeed him would maintain those standards.
Democrat Hillary Clinton accepts campaign money from lobbyists and relies on them to collect political donations from others. In all, federal lobbyists have raised a little more than $7 million on her behalf through the end of June, Federal Election Commission records show.
Clinton, like Obama, voluntarily discloses the names of people who raise money on her behalf. Republican Donald Trump has not.
In an election that has seen everyone from Trump to Clinton’s vanquished rival Sen. Bernie Sanders rail against a “rigged” system in Washington, government-integrity advocates say Clinton has far exceeded Trump’s level of disclosure on everything from tax returns to his top fundraisers. But now they'd like the candidates to detail the ethics policies they would enact if elected.
“It’s remarkable that post-Labor Day, we don’t have a commitment from either candidate on these meaningful transparency issues,” said Meredith McGehee, policy director of the non-partisan Campaign Legal Center.
Neither campaign responded to interview requests on the topic — even as they face fresh transparency questions this week.
Clinton, 68, fell ill Sunday at an event commemorating the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Clinton’s campaign aides acknowledged they mishandled the situation by waiting two days to disclose a pneumonia diagnosis.
Clinton’s camp has promised to release more medical details in the coming days. So has Trump, who said he said he underwent a medical examination in the past week and plans to release "specific" results. He also is scheduled to do an hour-long interview on the topic Thursday on The Dr. Oz Show.
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Previous details about Trump’s health were restricted to a four-paragraph letter from his personal physician Dr. Harold Bornstein, which concluded the 70-year-old would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”
Last year, Clinton released a nearly two-page letter from her doctor, Dr. Lisa Bardack, which pronounced her in “excellent physical condition.” It spelled out a number of conditions, such hyperthyroidism, and detailed her medical history, including treatment for a 2012 concussion.
Eight years ago, Arizona Sen. McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee, let reporters view more than 1,100 pages of his medical history in a rare move to quell concerns about his health. McCain is a cancer survivor who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.
In 2008, an animating theme of Obama’s successful presidential campaign was a drive to reduce the influence of lobbyists in Washington and create a more open government.
On his first day in office in January 2009, Obama signed an executive order that barred former federal lobbyists from working for agencies they had lobbied during the previous two years. He also barred his appointees from lobbying their ex-colleagues for two years after leaving the government, although critics note that hasn’t stopped a stream of former aides from taking lucrative government-affairs jobs.
“One can certainly criticize his transparency record, but you can’t say it wasn’t part of his agenda,” said John Wonderlich, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit group that promotes an open government.
But in this year’s campaign, he said, “transparency is coming up in a negative, accusatory aspect, rather than: ‘How we can we run the government better?’"
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Clinton, who has released nearly 40 years of tax returns, has hammered Trump over his refusal to release his. He has cited an ongoing IRS audit as the obstacle. Presidential candidates aren't required to release their tax returns, but every major-party nominee has done so for the past four decades.
On Tuesday, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told CNN that Trump would make his taxes public “when his lawyers and his accountants tell him that he should release them, when he's no longer under audit.”
Trump’s camp, meanwhile, routinely casts Clinton as corrupt, slamming her for erasing thousands of emails on the private server she used as secretary of State, granting State Department access to Clinton Foundation donors and accepting Wall Street money for her campaign.
And both face persistent questions about how they would disentangle themselves from outside interests: the foundation in Clinton's case, and Trump's real-estate and branding empire that he continues to help oversee while seeking the presidency.
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For her part, Clinton has spelled out specific policies on one issue closely related to government integrity: campaign finance. They include a pledge to sign an executive order requiring companies with federal contracts to disclose their political donations. And she has promised call for a constitutional amendment overturning the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in her first 30 days as president.
The 2010 decision authorized corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence candidate elections.
“That was a total yawn for me,” said McGehee of Clinton’s Citizen United pledge. “There’s not much the president can do in a real sense” to advance a constitutional amendment, she said. “And it’s not going to get through Congress.”
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Still, McGehee, other government watchdogs and Clinton allies say the former secretary of State remains far ahead of Trump on transparency questions.
“It doesn’t compare,” said Norman Eisen, a former U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic who served as Obama’s top ethics lawyer in the White House. “Hillary Clinton has promised to redress Citizens United, and Mr. Trump has brought the head of Citizens United into his campaign!” he said, referring to the appointment of veteran conservative activist David Bossie as Trump’s deputy campaign manager.
Until recently, Bossie ran Citizens United, the group that took the campaign-finance challenge to the Supreme Court.
Jan Baran, a veteran Republican ethics and elections lawyer, said both candidates have been inconsistent. He called Trump's brief note from his doctor "odd" but said the two-day delay in Clinton disclosing her pneumonia diagnosis also shows she's been less than forthcoming about "her recent medical history."
"I don't think either Clinton or Trump is going to win a gold medal in transparency this year," Baran said.
Obama's executive order on ethics remains in force after he leaves office, but the next president can opt to rescind it or replace it with his or her own ethics policy.
There are signs that Clinton aides are devising one. Her camp has begun to reach out to watchdogs to gather more ideas on ethics, McGehee said, but added she’s not even sure “who you would talk to” in the Trump campaign about the topic.
Trump largely has made blanket statements about Obama’s executive orders and condemns most of them as “bad” in a video on his campaign website. In a speech Monday night, he pledged to “immediately terminate every single unconstitutional executive order” Obama has signed.
Lisa Gilbert of the liberal-leaning watchdog group Public Citizen said she’s optimistic that the next president will follow Obama's lead. “It would be very hard from a public-relations vantage to roll back an executive order on ethics," she said.