Abuse of Power

“While every presidential administration in our history has had its ethical challenges, we’ve never seen so many corruption scandals and appalling lack of concern for the ethics rules that should govern our executive branch than with this administration,” said Karen Hobert Flynn, the president of the nonpartisan reform group Common Cause.

Today at 10:00 a.m. Common Cause President Karen Hobert Flynn will testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform at its hearing “H.R. 1, For the People Act: Strengthening Ethics Rules for the Executive Branch” in Room 2154 of the Rayburn House Office Building. Her full written testimony was submitted to the Committee in advance of the hearing.

The president's well-documented lies and exaggerations are disturbing and unprecedented, but when he openly ignores and ridicules the findings of the U.S. intelligence community, he puts American lives at risk, diminishes our role in the world, and makes us all less safe.

“It’s really just a system of self-policing,” said Julia Vaughn, policy director of Common Cause Indiana, a government watchdog group. “Obviously, the individuals have widely varying abilities to police this . . . widely varying in their sensitivity to what constitutes a conflict or not. In their mind, they’re protecting the institution in that way,” Vaughn added. “I think, long term, just the opposite happens. The institution is hurt when we constantly have these kinds of situations when everybody outside the statehouse seems to see a conflict of interest, but nobody inside the statehouse can see it.”

The details of Stone’s allegedly illegal activities laid out in the indictment implicate the Trump campaign, and perhaps President Trump himself, in illegally soliciting a campaign contribution from a foreign national—namely, hacked emails damaging to Hillary Clinton, in the possession of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and originating with Russian military intelligence hackers.

Roger Stone’s indictment implicates the Trump campaign in campaign finance violations during the 2016 election related to WikiLeaks documents provided by Russian Intelligence officials. The indictment makes clear that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has uncovered evidence that a “senior Trump campaign official was directed” by someone else within the campaign, perhaps Donald Trump himself, to contact Stone and request that Stone obtain “damaging information” on Clinton from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who was in possession DNC emails that had been hacked by Russian intelligence officers.