Trump Administration/Executive Ethics

“This looks like the latest example of Trump administration officials bending and breaking ethics laws and norms,” said Paul Seamus Ryan, the vice president of litigation for the group Common Cause. “This is unfortunately par for the course for this administration.”

Paul Seamus Ryan, of the nonprofit group Common Cause, said it was legal for candidates to rent things from their own business — as long as they appeared to be paying market rates and not overcharging. But, Ryan said, he had never seen anyone do it at the scale Trump has. “It’s extremely unusual. Unprecedented, in my experience — 20 years or so, watchdogging money in elections,” said Ryan, an election-law expert.

Tonight, under Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s direction, Senate Republicans did profound damage to the Senate and the Supreme Court of the United States. They subverted the serious and deliberative constitutional obligation that we (and many others) called on them to uphold just 38 days ago. Instead, they rushed through Committee hearings and made a mockery of advice-and-consent by ramming Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination through to a lifetime appointment only eight days before Americans finish voting and after more than 60 million Americans have already voted. In so doing, Senate Republicans excused her incomplete answers to basic questions—demurring on whether “climate change is happening” (it is) and whether voter intimidation violates federal law (it does). They smothered Justice Ginsburg’s “most fervent wish” that her replacement be considered after the election. And they did so at the expense of millions of Americans suffering from the coronavirus pandemic who desperately needed the Senate to negotiate and pass COVID relief legislation.

Under the Hatch Act, government officials are prohibited from using government resources to engage in partisan political activity, and from commanding other government employees to do so. Paul Seamus Ryan, a vice president at the government watchdog group Common Cause, said that if explicit communications surfaced linking the discount cards to the president’s re-election, health officials could face punishment. “It is likely these are people who could face criminal and civil legal liability if they go through with this scheme and it is for a political purpose,” he said.

Having her pay for an ad campaign “in my opinion would be an illegally large in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign,” said Paul S. Ryan, the vice president for policy and litigation at the good-government group Common Cause. Even if she were just to appear in an ad, without funding it, there would be a value to Ms. Manigault Newman’s time that would almost certainly exceed the $2,800 federal contribution limit, Mr. Ryan said.

"It's more important to ensure that every vote counts than knowing the results on election night," Karen Hobert Flynn, the president of Common Cause, told Insider. "We do expect that part of [Trump]'s playbook is to question the integrity of mail-in voting, which we know can be done safely...we need to be giving time for those votes to be counted."