Ethics Chief for One GOP President Tells Groton Why He's Suing Another

The Bush administration put Richard Painter in as its chief ethics counsel because the Republican lawyer knew business law—and how money could get officials in trouble.

From 2005 to 2007, he was an early-warning system for the president, helping vet appointees for potential problems or researching issues that could backfire and cause scandal for the White House.

These days, Painter is suing another Republican president, and he recounted his journey from White House insider to White House irritant to an engaged Groton audience on Thursday night, April 6.

Even when he was in the White House, Painter saw a broken campaign finance system. “It was a cesspool of campaign muck … The money was coming in from all over the world … even though it was technically illegal,” he said.

He feared that a foreign government could influence a president, a fear that grew when the Supreme Court, in its Citizens United ruling, relaxed limits on campaign funding.

Painter, now a University of Minnesota law professor, offered Groton students and faculty an impromptu history lesson in the origin of the Constitutional clause—known as the emoluments clause—that prevents officials from taking gifts or profiting from foreign officials. The reason for the clause was to prevent the young American republic from being swayed by the big powers of the day, which were then Britain, France, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and—he noted pointedly—Russia. The word “emoluments” has a Latin root, emolumentum, that dates back to the profit that mill owners earned for grinding grain.

At the time, British parliamentarians were being bought off by its royalty with appointments or stipends, or by the French king through portraits laced with diamonds in their frames, Painter said.

Flash forward to 2016. Painter’s take: Many Americans felt that their politicians were being bought, that big money was lining up with Hillary Clinton. On the Republican site, the Koch Brothers—major donors—started “auditioning” candidates beyond the establishment-blessed Jeb Bush, and only one person in the field looked independent: billionaire and real estate mogul Donald Trump.

Even before the election, a problem arose: “It’s not so much what he owns but what he owes,” Painter said. Big real estate projects require big loans, and Trump has not been forthcoming on where much of that money has come from. Furthermore, diplomats and foreign influencers could choose (and in many cases, have chosen) to stay in a Trump hotel in Washington, for example, or to use his golf clubs around the world to curry favor.

“We don’t want our leaders taking profits for dealing with foreign governments,” Painter said, explaining that the conflict of interest could cloud their judgment. What if Groton’s most famous alum, he posited, had had a Roosevelt Tower in Rome or Berlin after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941? Would Franklin D. Roosevelt have been more reluctant to fight Germany and Italy?

Painter is vice chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which is suing the Trump administration to provide, at least to a judge, the financial books from the Trump Organization to assess conflicts of interest. The White House and its Justice Department are challenging the federal court suit.

Whichever way the lawsuit turns out, campaign finance is still broken, Painter said. Many Americans feel they don’t have a voice in a government that has overseen increasing concentrations of wealth.

So, how would Painter fix it? He told students and faculty that he’d love for every American taxpayer to be able to have a $200 tax credit to support the candidate of their choice. That would be a good first step to restoring the people’s voice, he said.

Richard Painter also is on the Board of Advisors for Issue One, where he has worked with Mike Peabody ’46 to build a bipartisan "ReFormers Caucus" (see Mike Peabody’s article on page 25 of the Fall 2016 Groton School Quarterly).

Photo by Millie Kim ’17

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