Can Anything Stop Donald Trump’s Corruption?
Key takeaways
- Bush nominated Hank Paulson, the C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs, as Treasury Secretary.
- It doesn’t apply to the President, but prior to 2016 Presidents acted as if it did, and placed their wealth in conflict-free investment vehicles, such as a blind trust, while they were in office.
- According to Trump’s financial-disclosure forms, a handful of these trades were in Goldman stock.
Bush nominated Hank Paulson, the C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs, as Treasury Secretary. By then, Paulson had accumulated about five hundred million dollars in Goldman stock. For Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota who was the chief ethics lawyer in the White House, this presented a problem: there is a federal conflict-of-interest statute that prohibits employees of the executive branch from participating in any action, or policy decision, that directly affects their financial interests. As Treasury Secretary, Paulson could conceivably do things that would benefit Goldman and, therefore, himself. Painter told Paulson that he would have to divest. The day after the Senate voted to confirm Paulson’s appointment, he filed to sell his Goldman stock.
The law at issue—Title 18 U.S.C. Section 208—is still on the books. It doesn’t apply to the President, but prior to 2016 Presidents acted as if it did, and placed their wealth in conflict-free investment vehicles, such as a blind trust, while they were in office. Donald Trump has flouted this convention, parking his fortune in a revocable trust that is managed by his sons, who are themselves busy dabbling in ventures and industries that intersect with the government, including cryptocurrency, nuclear fusion, drones, and lucrative real-estate deals in foreign countries. We have now learned that during the first three months of this year, financial firms acting for the President made more than thirty-six hundred stock trades, with a combined value, per Reuters, of between two hundred and twenty million and seven hundred and fifty million dollars.
According to Trump’s financial-disclosure forms, a handful of these trades were in Goldman stock. Worth less than $1.5 million, they represented a drop in a capacious bucket that contained much larger plays in companies that have been directly affected by the Trump Administration, including Nvidia, Boeing, and Oracle. But the irony wasn’t lost on Painter. “It turns out, you can have a President who owns stock in Goldman Sachs and other banks and many other companies with interests before the government,” he deadpanned, when I spoke to him last week.