NYT - A Vocal Defender of Ethics Has Fans and Foes (Walter Schaub)

The one thing that is often ignored is that Walter Schaub started his career in the Bush administration. He is hardly a Democratic partisan. Yet, he has been unrelenting in his criticism of Trump's ethical lapses.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/30/us/politics/walter-shaub-ethics.html?_r=0

It was in 2006 that Mr. Shaub first began formally working on ethics issues, overseeing the office’s program guiding 1,100 or so presidential nominees through legally required financial disclosures. He turned the program around, writing standardized handbooks to speed up a typically ornery process and developed a reputation among Democrats and Republicans in the White House as a stern, but highly proficient, steward.

“I’d call him up on a Thursday or Friday night and say we need to get this done over the weekend, and he would get the ethics lawyers and the agencies to stay and get it done,” said Richard W. Painter, who served as ethics counsel for the George W. Bush White House. He has vocally defended Mr. Shaub’s approach in recent months.

When Mr. Obama nominated Mr. Shaub for the agency’s top job and its only politically appointed post four years later, Congress approved him by voice vote, a rare sign of shared confidence from an otherwise sharply divided Congress. The first four years of his tenure have borne that out, colleagues say. Mr. Shaub has spent the bulk of his time pursuing prosaic bureaucratic reforms like file digitization and developing an online training program for the government’s varied ethics officers.

“This is not a guy who came from the outside and sees this as a great platform for becoming famous,” said Danielle Brian, the executive director of the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight. “This is a guy who has been working quietly for a long time on ethics issues.”