When Fox News staffers break ethics rules, discipline follows — or does it?

Margaret Sullivan
The Washington Post
Originally published November 29, 2018

There are ethical standards at Fox News, we’re told.

But just what they are, or how they’re enforced, is an enduring mystery.

When Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro appeared onstage with President Trump at a Missouri campaign rally, the network publicly acknowledged that this ran counter to its practices.

“Fox News does not condone any talent participating in campaign events,” the network said in a statement. “This was an unfortunate distraction and has been addressed.”

Or take what happened this week.

When the staff of “Fox & Friends” was found to have provided a pre-interview script for Scott Pruitt, then the Environmental Protection Agency head, the network frowned: “This is not standard practice whatsoever and the matter is being addressed internally with those involved.”

“Not standard practice” is putting it mildly, as the Daily Beast’s Maxwell Tani — who broke the story — noted, quoting David Hawkins, formerly of CBS News and CNN, who teaches journalism at Fordham University...

The info is here.

How Wilbur Ross Lost Millions, Despite Flouting Ethics Rules

Dan Alexander

Forbes.com

Originally published December 14, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

By October 2017, Ross was out of time to divest. In his ethics agreement, he said he would get rid of the funds in the first 180 days after his confirmation—or if not, during a 60-day extension period. So on October 25, exactly 240 days after his confirmation, Ross sold part of his interests to funds managed by Goldman Sachs. Given that he waited until the last possible day to legally divest the assets, it seems certain that he ended up selling at a discount.

The very next day, on October 26, 2017, a reporter for the New York Times contacted Ross with a list of questions about his ties to Navigator, the Putin-linked company. Before the story was published, Ross took out a short position against Navigator—essentially betting that the company’s stock would go down. When the story finally came out, on November 5, 2017, the stock did not plummet initially, but it did creep down 4% by the time Ross closed the short position 11 days later, apparently bolstering his fortune by $3,000 to $10,000.

On November 1, 2017, the day after Ross shorted Navigator, he signed a sworn statement that he had divested everything he previously told federal ethics officials he would. But that was not true. In fact, Ross still owned more than $10 million worth of stock in Invesco, the parent company of his former private equity firm. The next month, he sold those shares, pocketing at least $1.2 million more than he would have if he sold when he first promised to.

The info is here.

Trump EPA official who was indicted on ethics charges has resigned

Brady Dennis
The Washington Post
Originally posted November 19, 2018

A regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, indicted in Alabama last week on violations of state ethics laws, has resigned.

Trey Glenn, who oversaw eight states in the Southeast as the EPA’s Region 4 leader, faces charges of using his office for personal gain and soliciting or receiving a “thing of value” from a principal or lobbyist, according to the Alabama Ethics Commission. He was booked at the Jefferson County Jail on Thursday in Birmingham and later released on a $30,000 bond, records show.

The charges against Glenn and a former business partner appear to stem from work helping a coal company fight liability in an EPA-mandated cleanup of a polluted site in north Birmingham. Glenn has denied wrongdoing, but he submitted his resignation over the weekend to acting EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler.

The info is here.

Editorial note: Just another example of how the swamp only deepened in the current administration.

Novartis links bonuses to ethics in bid to rebuild reputation

John Miller
Reuters
Originally posted September 17, 2018

Swiss drugmaker Novartis (NOVN.S) has revealed its employees only get a bonus if they meet or exceed expectations for ethical behavior as it seeks to address past shortcomings that have damaged its reputation.

Chief Executive Vas Narasimhan has made strengthening the Swiss drugmaker’s ethics culture a priority after costly bribery scandals or legal settlements in South Korea, China and the United States.

Employees now receive a 1, 2 or a 3 score on their values and behavior. Receiving a 2, which Novartis said denotes meeting expectations, or a 3, for “role model” behavior, would make them eligible for a bonus of up to 35 percent of their total compensation.

Novartis said it began the scoring system in 2016 but details have not been widely reported. Company officials outlined the system on Monday on a call about its ethics efforts with analysts and journalists.

The info is here.

Top Cancer Researcher Fails to Disclose Corporate Financial Ties in Major Research Journals

Charles Ornstein and Katie Thomas
The New York Times
Originally published September 8, 2018

One of the world’s top breast cancer doctors failed to disclose millions of dollars in payments from drug and health care companies in recent years, omitting his financial ties from dozens of research articles in prestigious publications like The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet.

The researcher, Dr. José Baselga, a towering figure in the cancer world, is the chief medical officer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He has held board memberships or advisory roles with Roche and Bristol-Myers Squibb, among other corporations, has had a stake in start-ups testing cancer therapies, and played a key role in the development of breakthrough drugs that have revolutionized treatments for breast cancer.

According to an analysis by The New York Times and ProPublica, Dr. Baselga did not follow financial disclosure rules set by the American Association for Cancer Research when he was president of the group. He also left out payments he received from companies connected to cancer research in his articles published in the group’s journal, Cancer Discovery. At the same time, he has been one of the journal’s two editors in chief.

The info is here.

Authors of premier medical textbook didn’t disclose $11 million in industry payments

Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky
www.statnews.com
Originally published March 6, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

“These findings indicate that full transparency of [author conflicts] should become a standard practice among the authors of biomedical educational materials,” according to the authors, whose study appears in the journal AJOB Empirical Bioethics.

McGraw-Hill, which publishes Harrison’s, did not respond to STAT’s requests for comment.

Financial disclosures have become de rigueur in scientific journals, where many of Harrison’s authors also publish and are subject to guidelines for such disclosures. Textbooks, however, have typically not required disclosures — and that means they’ve fallen even more behind standard practices.

The researchers, led by Brian Piper, a neuroscientist at the Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine in Scranton, Pa., acknowledge that simply looking at patent awards and fees from biomedical companies doesn’t prove the existence of biased work. But they note that medical textbooks are enormously influential due to their perceived authority and the wide readership they receive.

The article is here.

Trump shifts meaning of 'Drain the Swamp' from ethics to anything he objects to

Noah Bierman
The Los Angeles Times
Originally posted February 9, 2018

Donald Trump long thought the phrase "Drain the Swamp" was a little hokey, he has confessed to crowds. Yet it stayed. If Frank Sinatra had to croon "My Way," even when he tired of it, Trump reasoned aloud, Trump could belt out his crowd-pleasing catchphrase.

More than a year into his presidency, Trump mouths the words a little less often. But rather than completely kill off a slogan that once rivaled "Build the Wall" in the Trump repertoire, he has done something more subversive: He has drained it of its meaning.

The motto no longer refers to Trump's promises of ethics and lobbying reforms — many of which have dropped by the wayside or been watered down — or to vows about stopping members of his administration from profiting from their service.

In recent months, Trump has rebranded the "swamp" to mean almost anything he objects to: reporters, opponents of his immigration plan, free traders, phonies, bureaucrats, politicians who vote against tax cuts.

The article is here.

Ben Carson’s family ethics drama, explained

Emily Stewart
Vox.com
Originally posted February 3, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Still, questions persist. Secretary Carson’s family has had more involvement in official business than is par for the course — executive branch officials aren’t supposed to use their offices to advance private or commercial interests, and anti-nepotism laws bar officials from employing or promoting the interests of their relatives. Documents obtained by Democratic-leaning nonprofit American Oversight and shared with CNN this week show multiple HUD-organized meetings for Carson Jr. and “friends.” Emails also suggest Ben Carson’s wife, Candy Carson, pushed for her son to get a meeting with Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao.

In a statement on Thursday, Carson asked his agency’s inspector general to look into his listening tour. “In my role as HUD secretary, I try to be as inclusive as possible and talk with a wide variety of people because when it comes to increasing access to affordable housing, no rock should remain unturned,” he said.

Carson just can’t seem to stay out of hot water, ethically speaking

This isn’t the first time Carson has been the subject of ethics scrutiny. Carson’s appearance at a campaign-style rally alongside President Trump in August raised questions about whether he had violated the Hatch Act, which bars executive branch officials from using their government positions to influence elections. Ethics watchdogs eventually agreed it was probably not a violation.

The article is here.

Reminder: the Trump International Hotel is still an ethics disaster

Carly Sitrin
Vox.com
Originally published August 8, 2017

The Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC, has been serving as a White House extension since Donald Trump took office, and experts think this violates several governmental ethics rules.

The Washington Post reported Monday that the Trump International Hotel has played host to countless foreign dignitaries, Republican lawmakers, and powerful actors hoping to hold court with Trump appointees or even the president himself.

Since visitation records at the Trump International Hotel are not made public, the Post sent reporters to the hotel every day in May to try to identify people and organizations using the facilities.

What they found was a revolving door of powerful people holding galas in the hotel’s lavish ballrooms and meeting over expensive cocktails with White House staff at the bar.

They included Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), whom Politico recently called "Putin’s favorite congressman”; Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA), who chairs the General Services Administration, the Trump hotel's landlord; and nine other Republican Congress members who all hosted events at the hotel, according to campaign spending disclosures obtained by the Post. Additionally, foreign visitors such as business groups promoting Turkish-American relations and the Romanian President Klaus Iohannis and his wife also rented out rooms.

The article is here.

An erosion of ethics oversight should make us all more cynical about Trump

The Editorial Board
The Los Angeles Times
Originally published August 4, 2017

President Trump’s problems with ethics are manifest, from his refusal to make public his tax returns to the conflicts posed by his continued stake in the Trump Organization and its properties around the world — including the Trump International Hotel just down the street from the White House, in a building leased from the federal government he’s now in charge of. The president’s stubborn refusal to hew to the ethical norms set by his predecessors has left the nation to rightfully question whose best interests are foremost in his mind.

Some of the more persistent challenges to the Trump administration’s comportment have come from the Office of Government Ethics, whose recently departed director, Walter M. Shaub Jr., fought with the administration frequently over federal conflict-of-interest regulations. Under agency rules, chief of staff Shelley K. Finlayson should have been Shaub’s successor until the president nominated a new director, who would need Senate confirmation.

But Trump upended that transition last month by naming the office’s general counsel, David J. Apol, as the interim director. Apol has a reputation within the agency for taking contrarian — and usually more lenient — stances on ethics requirements than did Shaub and the consensus opinion of the staff (including Finlayson). And that, of course, raises the question of whether the White House replaced Finlayson with Apol in hopes of having a more conciliatory ethics chief without enduring a grueling nomination fight.

The article is here.

DOJ corporate compliance watchdog resigns citing Trump's conduct

Olivia Beavers
The Hill
Originally published July 2, 2017

A top Justice Department official who serves as a corporate compliance watchdog has left her job, saying she felt she could no longer force companies to comply with the government's ethics laws when members of the administration she works for have conducted themselves in a manner that she claims would not be tolerated.

Hui Chen had served in the department’s compliance counsel office from November 2015 until she resigned in June, breaking her silence in a LinkedIn post last week highlighted by The International Business Times, which points to the Trump administration’s behavior as the reason for her job change.

“To sit across the table from companies and question how committed they were to ethics and compliance felt not only hypocritical, but very much like shuffling the deck chair on the Titanic," Chen wrote.

The article is here.

Shining Light on Conflicts of Interest

Craig Klugman
The American Journal of Bioethics 
Volume 17, 2017 - Issue 6

Chimonas, DeVito and Rothman (2017) offer a descriptive target article that examines physicians' knowledge of and reaction to the Sunshine Act's Open Payments Database. This program is a federal computer repository of all payments and goods with a worth over $10 made from pharmaceutical companies and device manufacturers to physicians. Created under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, the goal of this database is to make the relationships between physicians and the medical drug/device industry more transparent. Such transparency is often touted as a solution to financial conflicts of interest (COI). A COI occurs when a person owes featly to more than one party. For example, physicians have fiduciary duties toward patients. At the same time, when physicians receive gifts or benefits from a pharmaceutical company, they are more likely to prescribe that company's products (Spurling et al. 2010). The gift creates a sense of a moral obligation toward the company. These two interests can be (but may not be) in conflict. Such arrangements can undermine a patient's trust with his/her physician, and more broadly, the public's trust of medicine.

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The idea is that if people are told about the conflict, then they can judge for themselves whether the provider is compromised and whether they wish to receive care from this person. The database exists with this intent—that transparency alone is enough. What is a patient to do with this information? Should patients avoid physicians who have conflicts? The decision is left in the patient's hands. Back in 2014, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America lobbying group expressed concern that the public would not understand the context of any payments or gifts to physicians (Castellani 2014).

The article is here.

Trump Exempts Entire Senior Staff From White House Ethics Rules

Lachlan Markay
The Daily Beast
Originally published May 31, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Andrew Olmem, another White House economist and a former lobbyist for a host of large financial services and insurance firms, will be free to work with former clients on specific issues affecting bank capital requirements, financial regulation of insurers, and the Puerto Rican debt crisis, all issues on which he has recently lobbied.

Those officials have been given freer rein to advance their former clients’ financial interests, but ethics rules have also been waived for every other “commissioned officer”—staffers who report directly to the president—in the White House who has worked for a political group in the past two years.

That will allow a number of White House staffers to collaborate with pro-Trump advocacy operations. The West Wing is stacked with officials who have made significant sums working, consulting for, or representing high-profile political organizations, including networks of groups financed by the Trump-backing Mercer family and the libertarian Koch family.

Conway herself consulted for more than 50 political, policy, and advocacy organizations last year, according to a White House financial disclosure statement.

The article is here.

Conflict of Interest and the Integrity of the Medical Profession

Allen S. Lichter
JAMA. 2017;317(17):1725-1726.

Physicians have a moral responsibility to patients; they are trusted to place the needs and interests of patients ahead of their own, free of unwarranted outside influences on their decisions. Those who have relationships that might be seen to influence their decisions and behaviors that may affect fulfilling their responsibilities to patients must be fully transparent about them. Two types of interactions and activities involving physicians are most relevant: (1) commercial or research relationships between a physician expert and a health care company designed to advance an idea or promote a product, and (2) various gifts, sponsored meals, and educational offerings that come directly or indirectly to physicians from these companies.

Whether these and other ties to industry are important is not a new issue for medicine. Considerations regarding the potential influence of commercial ties date back at least to the 1950s and 1960s. In 1991, Relman reminded physicians that they have “a unique opportunity to assume personal responsibility for important decisions that are not influenced by or subordinated to the purposes of third parties.” However, examples of potential subordination are easily found. There are reports of physicians who are paid handsomely to promote a drug or device, essentially serving as a company spokesperson; of investigators who have ownership in the company that stands to gain if the clinical trial is successful; and of clinical guideline panels that are dominated by experts with financial ties to companies whose products are relevant to the disease or condition at hand.

The article is here.

Conflict of Interest: Why Does It Matter?

Harvey V. Fineberg
JAMA. 2017;317(17):1717-1718.

Preservation of trust is the essential purpose of policies about conflict of interest. Physicians have many important roles including caring for individual patients, protecting the public’s health, engaging in research, reporting scientific and clinical discoveries, crafting professional guidelines, and advising policy makers and regulatory bodies. Success in all these functions depends on others—laypersons, professional peers, and policy leaders—believing and acting on the word of physicians. Therefore, the confidence of others in physician judgment is of paramount importance. When trust in physician judgment is impaired, the role of physicians is diminished.

Physicians should make informed, disinterested judgments. To be disinterested means being free of personal advantage. The type of advantage that is typically of concern in most situations involving physicians is financial. When referring to conflict of interest, the term generally means a financial interest that relates to the issue at hand. More specifically, a conflict of interest can be discerned by using a reasonable person standard; ie, a conflict of interest exists when a reasonable person would interpret the financial circumstances pertaining to a situation as potentially sufficient to influence the judgment of the physician in question.

The article is here.

Ethics experts question Kushner relatives pushing White House connections in China

Allan Smith
Business Insider
Originally published May 8, 2017

Ethics experts criticized White House senior adviser Jared Kushner's relatives for using White House connections to enhance a presentation to Chinese investors last weekend.

Members of Kushner's family gave multiple presentations in China detailing an opportunity to "invest $500,000 and immigrate to the United States" through a controversial visa program and promoting ties to Kushner and President Donald Trump, according to media reports.

Richard Painter, who was President George W. Bush's top ethics lawyer from 2005 to 2007 and is now a professor at the University of Minnesota, told Business Insider the presentation was "obviously completely inappropriate."

He added that the Kushner family "ought to be disqualified" from the EB-5 visa program they were promoting. The visa is awarded to foreign investors who invest at least $500,000 in US projects that create at least 10 full-time jobs.

The article is here.

Ethics agency to review waivers for Trump appointees

Bill Allison
The World Daily
Originally published April 29, 2017

The federal ethics agency is reviewing every waiver of conflict-of-interest rules that President Donald Trump’s appointees have received.

A memorandum from the U.S. Office of Government Ethics seeks documentation of waivers granted to appointees ordinarily required to recuse themselves from matters in which they or family members have a financial interest.

Issued by the agency’s director, Walter Shaub, it specifies that all agencies and appointees, “including White House officials,” must comply with the notice, which covers appointees in the administrations of Trump and Barack Obama.

The article is here.

Ethics office says it wasn’t consulted about Ivanka Trump job

CNN Wire

Originally published May 2, 2017

The White House brought Ivanka Trump on as an adviser without consulting the Office of Government Ethics, the ethics office says.

The New York Times and Politico reported March 20 that the president’s older daughter was working out of a West Wing office. A White House official told CNN that she would get a security clearance but would not be considered a government employee.

The next day, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer assured reporters that Ivanka Trump would follow the ethics restrictions that apply to federal employees. He said she was acting “in consultation with the Office of Government Ethics.”

But the ethics office, in a letter made public Monday, said it was not consulted. Director Walter Shaub said he reached out to the White House and to Ivanka Trump’s lawyer on March 24 to tell them that Ivanka Trump should be considered a federal employee, subject to those rules.

The article is here.

Ethics office details conflict of interest rules for Ivanka Trump

Olivia Beavers
The Hill
Originally posted May 1, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Shaub said the ethics rules prevent top White House appointees “from participating personally and substantially in particular matters directly and predictably affecting their financial interests.” They typically do so by recusing themselves from “particular issues that would affect the appointee's personal and imputed financial interests.”

The ethics office plans to review Ivanka Trump’s disclosures after they are filed.

“After the report is revised, OGE seeks information about how the White House is addressing any potential conflicts of interest identified during the review process,” Shaub continued. “OGE then makes a determination regarding apparent compliance with financial disclosure and conflict of interest rules and either certifies or declines to certify the financial disclosure report.”

The article is here.

Contempt for ethics hobbles Trump

Norman L. Eisen and Richard W. Painter
USA Today
Originally published April 26, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Finally, there is Trump’s core ethics promise to “drain the swamp” in Washington. Instead, he has brought a large number of lobbyists and other persons into his administration with a vast array of personal financial conflicts of interest (exceeded only by those of the president himself). The swamp has become a cesspool — an upscale one, dominated by billionaires. A number of the high-ranking officials in Trump's administration, like their leader, insist upon maintaining   their investments in various businesses, while at the same time conducting official U.S. government policy. The Senate vetting of their conflicts has contributed to the historically slow confirmation pace of Trump nominees (another embarrassment). In government, divided loyalties do not work.

The White House's lax attitude toward ethics results in both bad ethics and bad policy, and encourages a host of lesser offenses like the recent promotion of Mar-a-Lago — a club where the president is still selling memberships for $200,000 — as the "winter White House" on official web pages of the State Department. Even a cursory check of ethics rules would have revealed that this is flatly prohibited, but nobody bothered to check. The message sent all over the world is that the United States is a land of "pay to play."

The article is here.