burchfield, bob ESQ

hayes recs

Constellation of Anti-Voting Groups Threaten Democracy

By Marc Elias

August 18, 2022

https://www.democracydocket.com/news/a-constellation-of-anti-voting-groups-threaten-democracy/

republican leaders of the anti-voting movement recently held a “gourmet dinner” at an “undisclosed location” to discuss my voting rights litigation. The event was billed as the inaugural leadership dinner for a group called the Honest Elections Project. I was not invited to attend.

There is a constellation of well-funded, right-wing groups that use the legal and political system to make voting more difficult and free and fair elections less likely. They range from mere vote suppressors to full-on election deniers. Most oppose expanding voting rights and support strict voting laws. Many seek to gut the Voting Rights Act entirely; others want it interpreted so narrowly as to be ineffective. None of these organizations supported Congress’ efforts to enact new pro-voter legislation.

These right-wing groups work closely with the RNC and with state legislatures to advance anti-voting legislation.

The American Constitutional Rights Union, Foundation for Government Accountability, Judicial Watch, Lawyers Democracy Fund, Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) and Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections are just a few of the groups fighting against voting rights in court. America First Legal Foundation, Election Integrity Network, Heritage Foundation and True the Vote also support anti-democracy legal efforts. The conservative American Legislative Exchange Council advances model anti-voting legislation for state legislatures.

We recently got a preview of how these groups will operationalize their legal efforts in court in the future. Earlier this year, a Florida federal judge struck down most of the state’s “Big Lie” voter suppression law. In doing so, the court found that Florida Republicans had intentionally discriminated against Black voters and had violated the constitutional rights of Floridians seeking to participate in the democratic process. On appeal, six national anti-voting groups filed separate “friend of the court” briefs opposing the lower court’s decision — in addition to the briefs by the state defendants and the Republican Party.

For many years, the Republican National Committee (RNC) was legally barred from participating in election monitoring or voter suppression efforts as a consequence of the GOP’s ugly history of targeting minority voters in the 1980s. When that bar was lifted in 2017, the RNC picked up where it had left off and ran so-called “election integrity” programs with state parties.

These anti-voting legal groups offer a path for Republicans to wield majority political power without majority support.

Now, in the post-Trump era, the RNC directly partners with voter suppression groups and efforts that two years ago would have been unthinkable. The party’s dismal court results following the 2020 election coupled with MAGA supporters’ distrust of the party establishment has left the GOP operating in the penumbra of the current stars of the election denier and voter suppression movement.

It’s not just what these groups do, but who runs them.

On PILF’s board of directors, for example, are Cleta Mitchell and John Eastman,both of whom served as lawyers for former President Donald Trump. Mitchell participated in the infamous telephone call during which Trump demanded that the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) find 11,000 votes and declare Trump the winner. Eastman, who has been in the news recently for having a search warrant executed against him, helped craft the January 2021 insurrection plan.

The Honest Elections Project — the host of the secret dinner — was formed in February 2020 and is connected to Federalist Society founder Leonard Leo.

The newest of these groups, Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections, was co-founded by former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr (R) and Karl Rove, who served as former senior advisor and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.Casino billionaire Steve Wynn provides the organization’s financial backing as its finance chair.

This group is notably more competent and well-resourced than the legal buffoonery who led Trump’s post-election antics. Though I am no fan of Barr, he is unlikely to hire lawyers who claim Hugo Chávez rigged elections from the grave or threaten to release the mythological Kraken. With Rove on its board as well, Barr is almost certainly not going to hold press conferences in a landscaping parking lot.

Notably, the infrastructure on the right is eclipsing the organizations on the left.

Historically, most organizations and resources dedicated to protecting the right to vote were connected to the left. Today there are still many important civil rights and voting rights organizations that bring litigation to protect the right to vote. Their work is invaluable. But most of those groups have broader portfolios that extend beyond voting rights and have insufficient resources to meet their growing needs.

What is notable about the right wing’s approach is the scope and interconnected nature of their legal efforts to undermine voting rights and free and fair elections.

Right-wing legal groups work in tandem with Republican legislatures dominated by election deniers. These organizations can help generate the most effective voter suppression policies that Republicans turn into laws. When those laws are challenged in court, the conservative legal groups then help defend them.

This brings me back to the “gourmet dinner” at an “undisclosed location” that I was not invited to attend. The right wing holds these events and funds these groups because they know that they cannot win fair elections. These anti-voting legal groups offer a path for Republicans to wield majority political power without majority support. They know that they lost in 2020. They are embarrassed that Trump was routed in post-election litigation. Some are upset that his coup failed on Jan. 6.

They set up new groups, hold secret dinners and create new voter suppression laws hoping that we will give up. I’m not sure what gave them that impression. After Trump was defeated in 2020, his team fought dozens of times in court — and lost. We didn’t give up then, and we certainly aren’t giving up now.

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Conservatives Have Been Packing the Courts for Years

We deserve a forward-thinking judiciary filled with movement lawyers who want to see progress for our nation.

ref

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/ex-trump-ag-barr-others-launch-republican-backed-election-law-group-2022-07-21/

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Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections was co-founded by Karl Rove, hotelier Steve Wynn and lawyer Bobby Burchfield

The group opposes courts intervening in state election laws

and has already filed briefs in court cases over new voting restrictions

(Reuters) - Prominent Republicans including former U.S. Attorney General William Barr on Thursday launched a new legal group they say is aimed at defending state legislatures’ right to set election laws.

The nonprofit group, Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections, is also co-founded by longtime Republican strategist Karl Rove, hotel magnate and GOP donor Steve Wynn and attorney Bobby Burchfield, who last year resigned from the law firm King & Spalding.

Burchfield told Reuters Thursday that the group was created in response to expanding court fights over election laws. It has already filed two briefs in election law cases backing state legislatures' ability to change voting rules.

“We do not think the courts should be setting the rules for elections. We believe that’s the province of state legislatures,” Burchfield said.

He said the nonprofit is not a “foil” to Democratic lawyers like Marc Elias, who left law firm Perkins Coie last year to start his own practice regularly litigating over election laws.

The group is not affiliated with former President Donald Trump and does not support particular candidates, Burchfield said. He said the groups' members reject claims made by some other conservatives that the 2020 election is illegitimate due to mass voter fraud.

Elias on Thursday told Reuters he believes the new organization is "fundamentally about making voting harder and opposing voting rights." He said that the state laws the group defends are falsely premised on the idea that fraud is rampant in U.S. elections.

One of the group's briefs, filed in June before the Montana Supreme Court, supports reinstating several new voting laws blocked by a judge in March, including ones eliminating same-day voter registration and heightening voter identification requirements in the state. The court in May suspended that ruling but has not issued a final decision.

Represented by lawyers from Jones Day, the group also filed a brief Tuesday at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit supporting a Republican-backed Florida law that restricts the use of drop boxes and third-party organizations' ability to collect voter registration forms. The court in May temporarily reinstated those measures after a lower court judge said they were racially discriminatory.

Wynn is the group's finance chair. It will also help others with a similar agenda through financial aid or "intellectual capital," by connecting them to lawyers, Burchfield said.

Burchfield last year represented the Republican National Committee and Trump’s reelection campaign in a pre-election legal challenge to North Carolina extending the deadline for receiving mail-in ballots in the 2020 race. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the case.

He was previously an outside ethics adviser to the Trump Organization but said Thursday he no longer holds that role.

Thomson Reuters

Jacqueline Thomsen, based in Washington, D.C., covers legal news related to policy, the courts and the legal profession. Follow her on Twitter at @jacq_thomsen and email her at jacqueline.thomsen@thomsonreuters.com.

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Newly revealed USPS documents show an agency struggling to manage Trump, Amazon and the pandemic

Nearly 10,000 pages of emails, memos and other private documents offered new details about the agency’s struggles and the pro-Trump figures to whom it turned for advice

Tony Romm,

Jacob Bogage and

Lena H. Sun

September 18, 2020

It would be months before Louis DeJoy took the reins of the nation’s mail system, and the U.S. Postal Service already was mired in crisis.

Mail carriers were in revolt, fearful they had few protections against the newly emerging coronavirus. The Trump administration was bearing down on its finances, sending USPS officials scrambling over what they saw as a potential illegal takeover of agency operations. And then there was a looming standoff with Amazon, which privately signaled it could take some of its lucrative delivery business elsewhere.

The tensions surfaced at an April 9 meeting, when Amazon executives “stated their concerns” about the Postal Service’s economic plight amid the pandemic and questioned its “viability to them as a continued shipping partner,” according to a once-secret memo circulated within the agency, which described the situation as an “inflection point.” (Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

The wide-ranging headaches that so troubled the USPS in April ultimately foreshadowed a summer of upheaval, thrusting the once-venerated agency into a political maelstrom months before a presidential election. Newly disclosed details of these struggles are laid bare in nearly 10,000 pages of emails, legal memos, presentations and other documents obtained by The Washington Post from American Oversight, a watchdog group that requested them under the Freedom of Information Act.

The documents, which mostly span March and April, depict an agency in distress, as its deteriorating finances collided with a public-health emergency and a looming election that would be heavily reliant on absentee ballots. During that period, the USPS occasionally relied on the legal counsel of well-connected Republicans, including Stefan C. Passantino, who once served as a top White House lawyer under President Trump. Passantino,whose role has not been previously reported, is also part of a new pro-Trump legal coalition preparing for the possibility of a contested election, a relationship that has raised new ethical flags among the administration’s critics.

Read the scrapped USPS announcement to send 5 masks to every American household

The records also offer fresh detail about the Postal Service’s precarious position in the White House’s early pandemic response. At one point in April, USPS leaders drafted a news release announcing plans to distribute 650 million masks nationwide, enough to offer five face coverings to every American household. The document, which includes quotations from top USPS officials and other specifics, was never sent. But it suggests that the government’s initial interest in tapping the Postal Service as part of its campaign to combat the coronavirus may have been far more advanced than initially reported this spring.

The Postal Service declined to discuss its specific dealings with the White House, Treasury Department or Amazon about its plans to distribute masks or its finances. David Partenheimer, a USPS spokesman, stressed in a statement that the agency is “firmly committed to being a source of constancy and reliability in every community.” The Postal Service later demanded in a letter that American Oversight remove some of the documents it had shared publicly online, citing the fact some of them had been improperly released.

“Our more than 630,000 employees are working to make sure our customers can depend on us,” Partenheimer said. “We’re on the front lines — delivering needed medicines, supplies, benefit checks, financial statements and the important correspondence every family counts on.”

But the emails and other records obtained by the Post offer fresh insight about the Postal Service, its philosophical shifts and the little-known board of governors overseeing its operations and finances. Lawmakers already have trained their attention on board leader Robert M. Duncan, a top Republican financier, for his political ties. The board later picked DeJoy, whose support for Trump, history of GOP fundraising and controversial USPS cost-cutting moves have stoked widespread criticism.

“I see President Trump’s fingerprints all over,” said Austin Evers, executive director of American Oversight. “It’s clear from the president’s public comments, and the actions of his administration, he has a major agenda for the post office — and we see a lot of it in black and white here.”

‘I don’t want to die’

The frantic emails began reaching the Postal Service leadership in March, mere weeks after the coronavirus is believed to have arrived in the United States. Mail carriers and, in some cases, their spouses practically pleaded with then-Postmaster General Megan Brennan and her top aides for help in protecting themselves on the front lines.

At the time, New York City was emerging as the U.S. epicenter of the pandemic. Yet postal employees continued delivering letters and packages even as broad swaths of the state had started to shut down. A local union leader, whose name is redacted in email records shared with The Post, urged Brennan to follow suit and temporarily cease operations in the city.

“I literally was on the phone today with many of my members screaming at me to do something [and] I don’t want to die,” the unnamed union official wrote, noting they had 12 confirmed coronavirus cases among the ranks by March 25. “You cannot expect the unions to convince the employees that if they come to work they have nothing to worry about.”

Roughly a week later, the USPS publicly pledged to stock up on personal protective equipment and allow employees to more easily take leave as soon as they felt sick. But angry notes continued to flood Brennan’s inbox, as postal workers and their families expressed fears for the public health crisis to come.

“WHY IN GOD’S NAME ARE THEY DELIVERING UNESSENTIAL MAIL to EVERY HOUSE in a HIGHLY INFECTED AREA!!!!” wrote an unidentified woman who described herself as the spouse of a mail carrier in Pennsylvania. “Do you want them to get the coronavirus! … You as post master seem to be the ONLY ONE who can do something about the situation … so DO SOMETHING, before the virus does it for you!”

Brennan did not respond to a request for comment. Partenheimer, the USPS spokesman, said in a statement that “supply chain issues” had affected the mail agency just as it had other businesses and institutions in the early stages of the pandemic. “However, those issues have long since been addressed and we are ensuring millions of masks, gloves and cleaning and sanitizing product are available and distributed to more than 30,000 locations every day through our Postal Service supply chain,” he added.

DeJoy’s Postal Service policies delayed 7 percent of nation’s first-class mail, Senate Democrat’s report says

Inside the agency, though, leaders at the time appeared to be scrambling to keep operations running smoothly. The Trump administration had deemed postal workers essential, with the critical task of delivering medicine, supplies and other goods to a nation upended by the pandemic and largely staying at home. Unlike other elements of the economy, the U.S. Postal Service simply could not shut down.

Some top administration officials even hoped to tap the Postal Service’s vast network — and its unrivaled ability to reach every U.S. Zip code — to help Americans obtain personal protective equipment. The idea originated out of the Department of Health and Human Services, which suggested a pack of five reusable masks be sent to every residential address in the country, with the first shipments going to the hardest-hit areas.

At the time, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been working on coronavirus guidance that recommended face coverings, a reversal of its previous position, in the face of mounting evidence that people could spread the coronavirus without experiencing symptoms. The Postal Service prepared for the possibility it might be deputized in the effort, drawing up a news release touting that it was “uniquely suited” to help. The service specifically identified Orleans and Jefferson parishes in Louisiana as the first areas to receive face coverings, with deliveries shortly thereafter to King County, Wash.; Wayne County, Mich.; and New York, according to the newly unearthed document, which is labeled a draft.

Before the news release was sent, however, the White House nixed the plan, according to senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal deliberations. Instead, HHS created Project America Strong, a $675 million effort to distribute “reusable cotton face masks to critical infrastructure sectors, companies, healthcare facilities, and faith-based and community organizations across the country.” About 600 million of the 650 million masks ordered have been distributed, a spokesperson for HHS said earlier this week, including 125 million set aside for schools. The White House later added in a statement that all of the face coverings had been distributed.

“There was concern from some in the White House Domestic Policy Council and the office of the vice president that households receiving masks might create concern or panic,” one administration official said in response to the scrapped mask plan.

Louis DeJoy was always his own boss. Whom does he serve now?

‘Fox in the hen house’

The Postal Service, meanwhile, faced a panic of its own. And it soon would try to turn to some of Trump’s closest political allies for help.

For years, the agency had been operating in the red. Its mandate to deliver to every U.S. Zip code had come at great cost, and it struggled to meet its workers’ sky-high retirement obligations — leaving it $160.9 billion in debt. The pandemic only exacerbated its financial standing, with agency officials in April predicting a $23 billion loss over the next 18 months and expressing fears the Postal Service could run out of money by October.

To bridge the gap, the Democratic-controlled House proposed setting aside $25 billion for the USPS as part of the March debate over coronavirus relief legislation. But the Republican-led Senate whittled that down to $13 billion, and Trump soon after threatened to veto any bill that included direct aid to the agency. Ultimately, Congress replaced the funding with a $10 billion loan in the package that became known as the Cares Act, a pot of money the Treasury Department was tasked with administering.

The approach appeared to spook the USPS, agency records show. The money seemed insufficient, the law itself presented serious legal challenges, and some mail service leaders questioned the Trump administration’s involvement, according to its emails and memos, prompting them to go on the offensive.

To boost its legal and political standing, the USPS turned to Passantino, a partner at the law firm Michael Best & Friedrich and a former deputy White House counsel for Trump. He departed the administration in fall 2018, but he never fully severed his ties to Trump’s orbit. Passantino has since helped the Trump Organization handle investigations led by House Democrats, for example, and he has consulted for a firm assisting his reelection campaign.

Duncan, the USPS board chairman, brought in Passantino and his law firm in part to help ease the agency’s financial stress, according to emails and people involved with high-level USPS deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide a frank assessment of the agency. The board also retained Republican consultant Rick Hohlt and others to address lingering policy and budget issues in Washington, the records reveal.

An April 1 memo also shows the USPS considered tapping one of Passantino’s colleagues — Reince Priebus, the former White House chief of staff and Republican National Committee chairman — believing he could help break a Washington logjam over the need for additional stimulus aid. People familiar with the matter said Priebus never made those calls, and Priebus is barred by executive order from lobbying the White House until 2022.

Priebus and Hohlt declined to comment. Passantino and his law firm did not respond to requests for comment. The Postal Service did not answer detailed questions about their work, including the extent to which Passantino or Hohlt worked on matters related to the election, but it confirmed the hires came at a time when the board of governors was understaffed.

Postal Service will prioritize ballots over other mail, postmaster general testifies

Ethics watchdogs raised concerns about new evidence showing additional overlap between the Postal Service, which will deliver ballots this fall, and the Republican Party.

“Why did the Postal Service need the services of Stefan Passantino when his primary claim to fame, the primary reason you hire him, is to carry out Donald Trump’s personal and political defense work?” asked Evers, the head of American Oversight, who called him the “fox in the hen house.”

The document trove also includes three separate email chains referencing calls with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and other agency officials over nine days in early April.Two people familiar with the matter say Treasury drove a hard line, demanding operating control over the agency in exchange for the $10 billion congressionally approved loan. Such a demand was unprecedented, postal experts said, and appeared to lead the USPS to hire another law firm in the spring to study the legality of the issue. That firm, Mayer Brown, concluded that Treasury’s request was illegal.

“Any agreement by the Postal Service to surrender its authority to the Secretary of the Treasury or to the [Federal Financing Bank] therefore would be illegal,” lawyers concluded in an unreleased April 24 memo, referring to a federal borrowing entity.

The Treasury Department ultimately backed away from the idea of assuming control of USPS operations, amid swelling opposition from congressional Democrats and Postal Service leaders.During an April 9 meeting between Kipp Kranbuhl, a Treasury assistant secretary; Gary Grippo, a career Treasury official; and Postal Service executives, Grippo said Treasury would not seek to take operating control as part of the terms, according to notes from the meeting. But the agency continued to press the idea for weeks, insisting that any loan to the USPS should result in it assuming operational control of the mail agency, three people familiar with the talks said.

Asked about the proposed arrangement, Monica Crowley, a Treasury spokeswoman, said in a statement that the USPS had been losing money — so the Trump administration sought to “protect” billions of dollars in loans ultimately authorized for the agency.

“As in any arms-length negotiation, some of these proposals were rejected by USPS, while other reforms, such as enhanced monthly and quarterly financial reports, were agreed upon as part of the recent $10 billion loan that Treasury and USPS agreed to terms on last month,” she said. “Treasury’s proposed financing conditions have at all times been commercially reasonable and consistent with law. It is absurd to describe commonsense conditions on continued taxpayer funding as a ‘takeover.’ ”

But the revelations still troubled some White House critics on Capitol Hill. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) faulted the administration in a statement for being “hell-bent on sabotaging the USPS,” adding, “Congress must protect the USPS from attacks by Trump and his cronies — tens of millions of Americans across the country are counting on us to act.”

Patients may have seen ‘significant’ delays in medicine deliveries by USPS, Senate report finds

‘What does the USPS look like’

Amazon would prove to be a bigger headache, according to USPS email records, which reveal new details about the e-commerce giant’s financial ties to the U.S. mail system.

Trump for years has alleged without evidence that the Postal Service is undercharging companies, particularly Amazon, that rely on it to deliver to addresses the company itself can’t reach — or, in industry parlance, the “last mile.” In April, the president even called on the agency to “raise the price of a package by approximately four times,” marking the latest in a long line of attacks against the company.

But the documents unearthed by American Oversight suggest Amazon is a lucrative client for the Postal Service. Amazon drove about $3.9 billion in revenue and $1.6 billion in profit for the USPS in fiscal 2019, according to multiple emails and financial statements obtained via open records laws. The Postal Service delivered 1.54 billion packages on Amazon’s behalf last year, about 30 percent of the company’s total volume in 2019, and deliveries and revenue increased this year, the documents also indicate.

Postal Service to review package delivery fees as Trump influence grows

Amazon declined to answer questions about its relationship with the USPS. “For more than two decades, Amazon has partnered closely with the United States Postal Service to invent and deliver for our customers, which has resulted in significant revenue for the USPS and thousands of American jobs,” company spokeswoman Rena Lunak said in a statement. “USPS continues to be a great partner in serving Amazon customers.”

White House spokesman Brian Morgenstern said in a statement that the agency “has been losing billions of dollars for more than a decade and is projected to lose tens of billions more in the next decade.”

The tensions came to head in April as Amazon and the USPS attempted to negotiate a new contract to determine the cost at which the country’s mail service will deliver packages on Amazon’s behalf. The relationship is a crucial one for the USPS, which warned throughout the spring that it stood to “cede” control to its competitors if it raised rates on Amazon too high, according to emails and memos obtained by The Post.

Louis DeJoy’s rise as GOP fundraiser was powered by contributions from company workers who were later reimbursed, former employees say

In response to the president’s attacks, the agency appeared to circulate a memo internally that appeared to fact-check his statements. Trump, for example, had claimed during a meeting of his coronavirus task force in late March that the agency “lose[s] money every time they deliver a package” for Amazon. USPS, however, countered that “unfunded government mandates,” such as its retirement obligations, are driving its budget woes — not Amazon.

“Amazon made it very clear that the USPS is alone, globally, among their partners in having this pricing uncertainty,” indicated the document. It is not clear who drafted it or to whom it was sent.

The documents do not indicate the status of the Postal Service’s talks with Amazon, but they do presciently list some of the e-commerce giant’s lingering questions about the agency amid a roiling pandemic that had thrust it and its finances into doubt: “What does the USPS look like in the new few weeks, the next few months and the next several years?”

Jay Greene contributed to this report.

Updated September 25, 2020

[Voting in the 2020 U.S. Election

What you need to know: How to make sure your vote counts in November | Absentee ballots vs. mail-in ballots | How to track your vote like a package | How to prevent your mail ballot from being rejected | More than 500,000 mail ballots were rejected in the primaries | Where Biden and Harris stand on voting issues | Google allows ads with ‘blatant disinformation’ about voting by mail

U.S. Postal Service: Postal Service backlog sparks worries that ballot delivery could be delayed in November | Why the USPS wanted to remove hundreds of mail-sorting machines | Can FedEx and UPS deliver ballots? | The cash-strapped Postal Service | Overhaul in USPS leadership | Newly revealed USPS documents show the agency’s 2020 ballot pressures, uncertainty]

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...The wide-ranging headaches that so troubled the USPS in April ultimately foreshadowed a summer of upheaval, thrusting the once-venerated agency into a political maelstrom months before a presidential election. Newly disclosed details of these struggles are laid bare in nearly 10,000 pages of emails, legal memos, presentations and other documents obtained by The Washington Post from American Oversight, a watchdog group that requested them under the Freedom of Information Act.

The documents, which mostly span March and April, depict an agency in distress, as its deteriorating finances collided with a public-health emergency and a looming election that would be heavily reliant on absentee ballots. During that period, the USPS occasionally relied on the legal counsel of well-connected Republicans, including Stefan C. Passantino, who once served as a top White House lawyer under President Trump. Passantino, whose role has not been previously reported, is also part of a new pro-Trump legal coalition preparing for the possibility of a contested election, a relationship that has raised new ethical flags among the administration’s critics.

...

To boost its legal and political standing, the USPS turned to Passantino, a partner at the law firm Michael Best & Friedrich and a former deputy White House counsel for Trump. He departed the administration in fall 2018, but he never fully severed his ties to Trump’s orbit. Passantino has since helped the Trump Organization handle investigations led by House Democrats, for example, and he has consulted for a firm assisting his reelection campaign.

Duncan, the USPS board chairman, brought in Passantino and his law firm in part to help ease the agency’s financial stress,according to emails and people involved with high-level USPS deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide a frank assessment of the agency. The board also retained Republican consultant Rick Hohlt and others to address lingering policy and budget issues in Washington, the records reveal.

....

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wapo no lnx

Trump announces new White House ethics team

Donald Trump and his attorney Sheri Dillon announce plans to separate him from his business affairs during a news conference in New York on Jan. 11, 2017. (Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images)]

By Drew Harwell and

Tom Hamburger January 25, 2017

President Trump announced the addition of a team of ethics lawyers to the White House Counsel’s Office Wednesday, hours after his family business announced that it was hiring a longtime Republican lawyer to ensure the Trump Organization minimizes conflicts of interest.

The double-barreled announcements drew some criticism for a president who enters office with more potential conflicts of interest than any previous chief executive, but also praise for the new compliance staff. At the White House, the team will be led by Stefan C. Passantino, an election-law expert in private practice who will have the title of deputy assistant to the president for compliance and ethics matters.

“It is a strong, experienced group of lawyers, but their client has dealt them an impossible hand,” said Norman Eisen, who served as ethics counsel to former president Barack Obama and is now part of a lawsuit accusing Trump of violating a constitutional provision barring presidents from taking payments from foreign governments.

Trump, Eisen said, “has brought a blizzard of conflicts to the White House” that seem likely to overwhelm the new team.

Among other clients, Passantino has represented former House speaker Newt Gingrich who hailed Pasantino in a White House news release, saying that “no one understands the ethics process better than Stefan.”

Earlier in the day, the Trump Organization named Bobby Burchfield, a veteran GOP lawyer who has advised both Bush presidential teams, to serve as an outside ethics adviser. George A. Sorial, a 10-year Trump company executive, will serve the internal role of chief compliance counsel, the company announced.

Burchfield,a partner in the Washington office of law firm giantKing & Spalding, will have the authority to approve or push back against any of the Trump company’s new domestic deals. “Certain transactions cannot be undertaken” without his approval, the company said.

Some ethics watchdogs were skeptical.

“Given Bobby Burchfield’s long-standing role in Republican Party efforts, he does not fit the definition of what would be considered an independent ethics adviser,”said Fred Wertheimer, founder of the good-government group Democracy 21.

“Every judgment that Bobby Burchfield has to make goes directly to the president’s financial interests,” Wertheimer added. “This is not credible as an independent ethics advisory position. And no one is going to be fooled by this.”

In addition to his work with presidential candidates, Burchfield is also chairman of Crossroads GPS, the nonprofit arm of the GOP super PAC American Crossroads, founded by Karl Rove. The Republican National Lawyers Association in 2015 named him Republican Lawyer of the Year.

The president and his attorney said earlier this month that Trump will leave the management and leadership of his real estate and licensing company to a trust run by his sons and a longtime company executive.

But Trump will not sell off his stake or divest from his company, a decision that was widely criticized by ethics specialists because it ensures that he will continue to hold a financial interest in the company’s performance.

Trump pledged this month that his company will make “no new foreign deals” during his presidency. But new domestic deals will be allowed if they pass what Trump attorney Sheri Dillon called a “vigorous vetting process,” opening what some ethics advisers have called a back channel for investors to curry favor with the new president.

In addition to Passantino, the Trump White House announced that three others will join the “compliance team” serving as special assistants and associate counsels to the president. They are: Uttam Dhillon, who served as chief oversight counsel for the House Financial Services Committee; Scott Gast, who served as investigative counsel to the Office of Congressional Ethics; and James D. Schultz, a lawyer in private practice who served as general counsel of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Robert Weissman, president of the consumer rights group Public Citizen, said Wednesday that Burchfield’s experience with the super PAC, a big-money group that does not disclose its donors, “doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in his ability to police ethical standards at the Trump Organization.”

Sorial, who joined the Trump company in 2007, is an internal promotion, having most recently worked as an executive vice president and counsel overseeing the company’s real estate deals.

Trump deals that were underway have continued, including the soft opening Wednesday of a new Trump-brand hotel and condominium tower in Vancouver, B.C.

Trump companies have also shared vast ambitions for new domestic deals during Trump’s presidency. Trump Hotels chief executive Eric Danziger, who leads the company’s eight hotels in five U.S. metropolitan areas, said at a Los Angeles investment summit on Tuesday that he did not “see any reason that we couldn’t be in all” 26 major metropolitan areas nationwide, according to a Bloomberg News report.

Matea Gold contributed to this report.