Office Gov't Ethics OGE
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generic to include congress (but sep node? house?) gaetz report?
belated 619
acting 2025?
Jamieson Lee Greer (born 1979 or 1980)[1] is an American government official, attorney and former Air Force officer who is serving as the 20th United States trade representative in the second Trump administration since February 2025. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served in the first Trump administration as chief of staff to the United States trade representative from 2017 to 2020 and was a partner in international trade at King & Spalding.
Early life and education
Greer graduated from Paradise High School in Paradise, California, in 1998 and then spent two years as a Mormon missionary in Brussels.[2][3] Greer attended Brigham Young University where he majored in international relations.[3] He pursued master's degrees from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and Sciences Po[4] and later attended the University of Virginia School of Law.[5] Between September and December 2007, Greer worked as a law clerk for the European Court of Justice.[citation ^needed]
Military service
From 2008 to 2012,[citation ^needed] Greer served as an officer in the United States Air Force Judge Advocate General's Corps. He served in Kansas and Turkey, and was deployed to Iraq where he served as chief of military justice.[3][6] He was honorably discharged from service in 2012.[citation ^needed]
Career
Greer later worked in private law firms specializing in trade law, including Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. He represented U.S. Steel in a lawsuit against China.[3] He is a partner in international trade at King & Spalding.[6] During his time as partner Greer contributed as a speaker at two Federalist Society events.[7]
First Trump presidency
Greer served as the chief of staff to Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer between 2017 and 2020.[6] Greer was involved in trade negotiations with China, and the talks about the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico.[8]
Second Trump presidency
[
](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vice_President_JD_Vance_swears_in_Jamieson_Greer_as_U.S._Trade_Representative.jpg)Greer being ceremonially sworn in by Vice President JD Vance, 2025
On November 26, 2024, President-elect Donald Trump announced his intent to nominate Greer to serve as United States trade representative in the second Trump administration.[6] Greer is the first Mormon Cabinet-level official since Mike Leavitt served as Secretary of Health and Human Services in 2009.[2][9][10] The Senate Committee on Finance voted 15–12 to approve his nomination on February 12.[11][12] On February 26, the United States Senate confirmed his nomination by a 56–43 vote.[13][14] On April 7, 2025, Greer was ceremonially sworn into office by Vice President JD Vance.[15]
[
](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Trade_Representative_Jamieson_Greer_with_Indian_Minister_of_Commerce_and_Industry_Piyush_Goyal.jpg)Greer with Indian commerce minister Piyush Goyal, 2025
In 2025, Greer was a supporter of the Trump administration's across-the-board tariffs, and said the pain of the tariffs was necessary to reduce trade deficits and bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States.[16][17] When Trump paused the tariffs for 90 days in April 2025, amid substantial economic turmoil, Greer was not informed of the decision until after Trump announced the pause.[17]
In April 2025,[18] Greer was appointed as acting director of the Office of Government Ethics and as acting special counsel.[19][20] On August 26, 2025, Greer was succeeded by Eric Ueland as acting director of the Office of Government Ethics.[21]
Views
Greer has described trade deficits as "a huge problem".[22]
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omfg
gmail
*in partnership with The Guardian.
In May 2024, a flashy ad went viral on social media warning that “across the country, there are real cases of fraud and abuses of the [election] system that have eroded our trust”. The ad pledged that “whistleblowers” who shared evidence of election fraud “will be rewarded with payment from our $5m fund”.
This reward was courtesy of a just-announced group, the Fair Election Fund, which has deep connections to Elon Musk’s political network, according to materials obtained by Documented.
The Fair Election Fund pledged that “the bulk of the group’s budget will be devoted to paying whistleblowers” for sharing their stories, and that it would launch “aggressive paid and earned media campaigns” that would “highlight these cases”.
It was followed by another ad that ran in swing states during the Olympics and told viewers “you could be eligible for compensation” for sharing evidence of election fraud.
Despite the group’s high-profile, deep-pocketed backers and lucrative bounty offers, it never revealed any evidence of voter or election fraud. Instead, the group took a series of unrelated detours into tangential areas like third-party ballot access, and its effort to uncover fraud reaffirmed what numerous studies, court rulings and bipartisan investigations have concluded: voter fraud is extremely rare.
The lack of evidence has not stopped Republicans in Congress and state legislatures from continuing to push restrictive voting laws aimed at addressing this phantom threat. Meanwhile, Musk is claiming that “fraud” justifies his efforts to slash government operations, but similarly has not revealed much evidence.
The Fair Election Fund has now gone radio silent. Sitemap data shows that the website has not been updated since October, and the X/Twitter account for the group has not posted since November. The group’s spokesperson, former representative Doug Collins, became Trump’s veterans affairs secretary, and is now also leading the office of government ethics.
Close ties to world’s richest man
The Fair Election Fund is a fictitious name for another 501(c)(4) non-profit, Documented can reveal, and operates within a network run by Musk’s top political advisers. The group received funding from the same dark-money vehicle Musk has used to channel his political spending, and also routed funds to another Musk-backed non-profit.
The group is housed within a non-profit now called Interstate Priorities, formerly known as the For Which It Stands Fund. Formed on 3 January 2023, the non-profit raised $8,226,000 from a single donation in 2023.
The group is led by Victoria “Tori” Sachs, a Republican operative who was also executive director of And to the Republic, a group also formed in January 2023 that supported Ron DeSantis’s presidential bid, including by funding DeSantis’s private jets and hosting quasi-campaign events.
The naming of the two Sachs-led groups – And to the Republic and the For Which It Stands Fund – and the timing of their creation in January 2023 suggests that the group that now houses the Fair Election Fund was originally intended to support DeSantis’s run, which Musk initially supported.
Sachs’s involvement continued through 2024, with her name appearing on records that accompanied the Fair Election Fund’s broadcast purchases.
Since 2022, Musk has been secretly channeling his political spending through a dark-money non-profit called Building America’s Future. That group is run by Generra Peck and Phil Cox, two Republican operatives who were involved in DeSantis’s failed presidential bid and now advise Musk. Building America’s Future reportedly backed the Fair Election Fund in 2024. It also provided half of And to the Republic’s overall fundraising in 2023.
The Fair Election Fund has other ties to the Musk advisers who lead Building America’s Future. Cox’s digital marketing firm IMGE LLC, which provides services to several groups in the Musk-backed, Building America Future-tied universe, manages the Fair Election Fund’s Facebook page, and an IMGE employee appears to be responsible for articles on the Fair Election Fund’s website.
The Fair Election Fund/Interstate Priorities also acted as a conduit to support other Musk-backed groups. The group’s 2023 tax return shows that it made a $1,550,000 grant to Citizens for Sanity, which Musk funded in 2022 through Building America’s Future, and which aired racist and transphobic ads that election cycle. That grant made up almost the entirety of Citizens for Sanity’s funding in 2023.
In the 2024 election cycle, Musk publicly disclosed at least $277m in political contributions to Super Pacs that worked to elect President Trump and other Republicans. It is not known how much he may have given to other politically active groups that disguise their donors.
A detour into third-party ballot access
The Fair Election Fund’s goal of exposing election fraud seemingly turned up nothing of significance.
Out of its $5m fund, the group announced $75,000 in “bounty” payments, releasing $50,000 in July 2024 and $25,000 in September 2024. The Fair Election Fund promised that it would “highlight” the election fraud stories it gathered through these payments via “aggressive paid and earned media campaigns”, but it never did so, which suggests that none of the evidence generated was consequential or credible.
Instead, the group took a detour in July 2024: it launched a $175,000 ad “blitz” targeting North Carolina state board of election (NCSBE) members who delayed placing third-party presidential candidates Cornel West and Robert F Kennedy Jr on the ballot. At the time, Republicans and their allies believed that West and Kennedy would act as spoilers to help Trump, by siphoning left-leaning votes away from the Democratic presidential nominee.
Ironically, the NCSBE had delayed a decision on West’s and Kennedy’s ballot eligibility based on evidence that petitions were obtained through fraudulent means – concerns that would seem to align with the Fair Election Fund’s stated mission of exposing election fraud.
The Fair Election Fund ads declared that the Democratic members of the NCSBE were “blocking your voting rights”, and offered a reward for evidence of the members’ “shady backroom deal”. The group also projected images on the side of the NCSBE’s building, and drove mobile billboards around the agency’s headquarters.
The Fair Election Fund also ran digital ads in North Carolina featuring Black voters, some of which asserted that “African American voices are not being heard”, while others declared “Support Equality, Support Inclusion, Support [Cornel West’s] Justice for All Party”. The group pushed similar efforts in states such as Michigan.
Democratic lawyer Marc Elias, who sought to keep West off of ballots in North Carolina and elsewhere, was a frequent target of the group. In October 2024, the group announced that it would be running a six-figure ad buy to “troll” Elias. The ads included mobile billboards around the Elias Law Group office as well as a full-page ad in the Washington Post, which declared: “We beat Marc Elias and his racist voter suppression lawsuits … He tried to disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters who support Cornel West, but the Fair Election Fund stopped him.”
The Fair Election Fund then veered into a series of efforts to chase other trending rightwing conspiracy theories.
For example, over the summer, the Fair Election Fund seized on to a far-fetched conspiracy theory about the online fundraising platform ActBlue, claiming to have found “60,000 potential discrepancies” in ActBlue-facilitated contributions to the Biden-Harris campaign, based on an investigation conducted “from late July to early August”. The group claimed to have “spent $250,000 on these initial findings” – a jaw-dropping sum to spend on a brief review of campaign finance records.
The group then announced a $50,000 ad buy in several swing states soliciting evidence from people who claim to have been “defrauded by ActBlue”. No evidence from this “investigation” has been made public.
In fall 2024, as conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting gained momentum, the Fair Election Fund announced that it would be launching a “six-figure investigation into noncitizen voting in seven key swing states”. The results of this “six-figure investigation” were never made public.
You’re on the free list for*The Shakedown
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an 11 24
As the clock winds down on Democratic control of the U.S. Senate, upper chamber lawmakers on Thursday confirmed President Joe Biden's nomination of David Huitema, head of the State Department's ethics program, to lead the Office of Government Ethics for a five-year term.
Senators voted 50-46 in favor of Huitema's confirmation to head the OGE through the duration of Republican President-elect Donald Trump's tenure, averting at least temporarily a scenario in which the winner of the 2024 election—who has refused to sign required transition-related ethics agreements and whose first term saw thousands of conflicts of interest—would be empowered to fill or stonewall the post.
The OGE has been without a director for more than a year, ever since the term of Trump appointee Emory Rounds expired. In September, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) blocked Senate Democrats' attempt to confirm Huitema via unanimous consent until after the presidential election, alleging "political weaponization of the U.S. government against Donald Trump by the Biden-Harris administration."
As the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen said ahead of Huitema's conf
One of the most important roles of the Office of Government Ethics is to oversee and advise the presidential transition process. The selection and nomination of most new administration officials takes place during the transition, in which OGE's vetting of pending nominees for conflicts of interest is most critical. The office needs to be fully staffed and operational during the course of the transition period.
However, Walter Shaub, who led the OGE during the Obama administration and resigned in 2017 after months of conflict with the Trump White House, warned in a Thursday interview with Government Executive that "it might be a hollow victory for government ethics if Trump fires Huitema after the inauguration."
"Even if Trump doesn't fire Huitema, OGE won't be able to prevent Trump's top appointees from retaining conflicting financial interests if the Senate grants Trump's request that lawmakers conspire in skirting or short-shrifting the constitutional confirmation process," Shaub added.
Still, ethics advocates cheered Huitema's confirmation, with the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington hailing what it called the "good news" and "an important step to safeguard ethics compliance ahead of a second Trump administration that threatens to be even more corrupt than the first."
As one Democratic strategist said on social media following his confirmation, "Buckle up, David Huitema."
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4 22 no twt
He wants to strip the right to vote from residents of Washington, D.C. and thinks the undocumented should have no path to citizenship. He wants a constitutional amendment requiring the federal government to balance the budget every year but opposes taxing the rich more. He thinks Americans should have an absolute right to gun ownership, the Equal Rights Amendment should not be ratified, there should be no federal requirements to hire women or minorities, women should never be able to have an abortion, and child adoption agencies should be allowed to discriminate against LGBTQ people.
CRT? That’s short for “Communist Race Theory Rep. Pat Fallon is a**freshman Republican from Texas, and already he’sunder investigation by the House Ethics Committee< why?
Unreported stock trading.
And not just a few stock trades.
“Between January and April 2021, Fallon made more than 90 stock trades, which were worth a total of at least $7 million,” Forbes reported Wednesday. “The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, or STOCK Act, requires representatives to report their securities transactions to the House Clerk’s office within 45 days. Fallon reported his 90-plus transactions in mid-June, meaning some trades were not disclosed until five months after they occurred.”[bloom raskin?]
A spokesperson for Fallon says he didn’t know he had to report the $7 million worth of trades.
He has, his office says, since filed all the paperwork and paid all the fines he owes,
Rep. Fallon is just the latest Republican this month to be under investigation by the House Ethics Committee.
Former Trump White House Physician, Rep. Ronny Jackson, also of Texas, and Rep. John Rutherford of Florida – who serves on the House Ethics Committee – are also under investigation, as is Democratic Rep. Thomas Suozzi of New York. Also in April, theCommittee announced it was closing its investigation into now-former Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, a Republican of Nebraska who resigned from Congress after being convicted of three felonies.
Rep. Fallon’s political positions via BillTrack50 and OnTheIssues.
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Office of Congressional Ethics
In 2016, Sessions criticized the independent, nonpartisan Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), calling it "a political witch hunt" and "an outside process that's very controversial, is not working well and is highly unpopular because of its original mandate and jurisdiction is hugely flawed."[43] In 2017, he publicly defended a House Republican plan to dismantle the OCE; the plan was abandoned after a public uproar.[44]
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democ in danger
https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/walter-shaub/
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/ethics-expert-details-the-scandals-in-the-white-houses-new-list-of-staff-salaries/
no lnx
Ethics expert details the scandals in the White House’s new list of staff salaries
CODY FENWICK
:{28 JUN 2019
Walter Shaub, the former director of the Office of Government Ethics who resigned in protest under President Donald Trump, has been a dogged critic of the administration as it flagrantly defies basic standards of behavior for the executive branch.And in a new Twitter thread on Friday, Shaub combed through the new list of White House staff salaries — which show that not only do violations not trigger punishments, but they don’t even hinder raises.
He pointed out, for instance, that newly named White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham — who used to do PR for the first lady — got a promotion and raise, despite having violated the Hatch Act.
:{Walter Shaub
?
@waltshaub
- Jun 28, 2019
2019 White House salaries was just posted.https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/July-1-2019-Report-FINAL.pdf …
Walter Shaub
?
@waltshaub
Looks like Stephanie Grisham's punishment for violating the Hatch Act was a $28,000 pay raise. That'll teach her.
But Grisham is still in the junior varsity league when it comes to violating the Hatch Act. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, on the other hand, has gone pro — she seems to think violating the law, which bars federal employees from electioneering, is part of her job. Trump’s own appointee to the Office of Special Counsel called for her firing, saying her brazen violations of the law were “unprecedented.”
But Trump didn’t fire her. In fact, as Shaub pointed out, she got a raise!Just not as generous as Grisham.
Walter Shaub
?
@waltshaub
Replying to @waltshaub
There's some real unfairness to Stephanie Grisham getting a $28,000 pay raise: Kellyanne Conway violated the Hatch Act way more times and only got a $3,300 pay raise.
Conway makes $183,000 a year, which is the salary cap for White House employees.
Madeleine Westerhout, the director of Oval Office operations, got a $15,000 raise and is now making $145,000, Shaub said. She, too, he pointed out, violated the Hatch Act, according to the Office of Special Counsel.
Shaub also noted that Mercedes Schlapp, like Conway, is making likewise making the maximum salary. This was notable, he pointed out, in light of the fact that her husband, Matt Schlapp, lobbies the Executive Office of the President. In other words, he’s getting paid to have influence over the president while his wife is working in the White House. It’s an outrageous conflict of interest, but under Trump, it’s par for the course.
Sean Doocey, who is the director of presidential personnel, overseeing recruiting and vetting for the White House, now makes $168,000. Shaub observed that while Doocey has been in the leadership of the office, it has been a site of incompetence and mismanagement. The Washington Post reported:
An obscure White House office responsible for recruiting and vetting thousands of political appointees has suffered from inexperience and a shortage of staff, hobbling the Trump administration’s efforts to place qualified people in key posts across government, documents and interviews show.
…
Every White House faces personnel challenges and includes young and politically connected employees who get jobs through friends or family and senior officials who move on to other assignments. But the shortcomings of this office, and Trump’s appointment process in general, are among the most pronounced in memory, according to presidential scholars.
“No administration has done it as poorly as the current one,” said Max Stier, president and chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group that teamed up with The Post to track appointments.
There are, however, two staffers listed as receiving exactly zero dollars in annual salary. That would be Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump — the president’s son-in-law and daughter.
While the U.S. government has laws against nepotism, the president used a loophole to hire the couple. They may think that taking no salaries somehow makes up for the obvious unfairness of their hiring, but it actually makes it worse. Federal employees should be financially dependent on the government, their employer, so that they’re not incentivized by other sources of money and so that their official decisions aren’t clouded by corruption. Naturally, Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s tenures at the White House — just like the president’s own term — have drawn troubling accusations of conflicts of interest.
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