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2470d ago / 7:35 PM UTC

Poll: More Americans Believe Comey Over Trump

HONESTY

By a 2-to-1 margin, Americans say they are more likely to believe former FBI Director James Comey than President Donald Trump when it comes to their differing accounts of events that led up to Comey's firing, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

Forty-five percent of respondents say they are more likely to believe Comey's version of events from his June 8 testimony to the U.S. Senate, versus 22 percent who are more likely to believe what Trump has said.

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2456d ago / 10:52 PM UTC

Outgoing Ethics Director: Appearances Count on Trump Financial Conflicts

HONESTY

The outgoing head of the federal government’s ethics watchdog agency said he is leaving his post still unsure whether President Donald Trump is using the White House to enrich his businesses and himself.

"I can't know what their intention is," Walter Shaub Jr., the director of the independent Office of Government Ethics, said in an interview with CBS News. "I know that the effect is that there's an appearance that the businesses are profiting from his occupying the presidency. And appearance matters as much as reality.”

Shaub wrote Trump on Thursday to inform him he would be resigning later this month. The government ethics director clashed with the White House even before Trump was sworn in, especially when it came to how the real estate mogul handled his business interests after his election victory.

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2527d ago / 5:42 PM UTC

100 Days In: How's Trump Doing on Honesty?

HONESTY

Status: Some action, much of it potentially detrimental

Trump promised that one of his first actions as president would be to propose a constitutional amendment imposing congressional term limits. He has failed to do so, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said it won't happen.

The president used executive authority to institute some of the ethics reforms he promised from the campaign trail, imposing a lifetime ban on White House staffers lobbying for foreign governments and imposing a five-year ban on lobbying for domestic clients.

But he also weakened an Obama-era lobbying restriction that barred lobbyists from taking a job within an agency they had tried to influence in the last two years, which gives lobbyists more power to take jobs in the Trump White House as soon as they quit from their lobbying roles.

Meanwhile, the swamp has hardly vanished: Dozens of lobbyists were found in Trump administration hiring rolls by ProPublica, who also discovered three hires working on the issues they’d lobbied on previously, like Shahira Knight, a former Fidelity lobbyist who had lobbied on retirement and tax issues and now is the president’s special assistant for tax and retirement policy. The White House may have given Knight a waiver, the investigative outlet reported, but there’s no way to know because the administration has also ended the government’s publication of those waivers through the Office of Government Ethics.

2594d ago / 9:30 PM UTC

Swamp Draining Efforts Stumble in Transition

HONESTY

Trump spent the months of his transition touting the fact that the president is exempt from conflict of interest legislation and defending himself against critics who said his continued ownership of his corporation created an ethical quagmire. 

His transition team was initially riddled with lobbyists, who were later announced to all be axed, then later found to still be involved. The GOP created a headache right off the bat for this goal when they attempted to gut the Independent Office of Governmental Ethics by putting it under Congressional control ahead of Trump's inauguration, earning outrage from critics.

Eventually, Trump tweeted his disapproval, and the effort failed just hours later.

2594d ago / 9:00 PM UTC

The Promise: 'Drain the Swamp' and Reform the U.S. Government

HONESTY

Campaigning as an outsider bent on tossing out the old, corrupt system and starting fresh, Donald Trump pitched himself as a reformer who could restore Americans' trust in the government with a package of ethics reforms. 

His plan to “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C. included placing restrictions on executive officials becoming lobbyists after leaving the public sector, something he accomplished in the first days of his administration with an executive order, and setting term limits for Congress, something that will prove much harder, if not impossible, to accomplish. He vowed to bring businesslike efficiency to the federal government, and said he would prosecute rival Hillary Clinton. He has since walked back that promise.

We'll watch to see whether Trump can restore trust in a government he derided while navigating his own conflicts of interest arising from his businesses. We will also look to see if he can root out corporate and lobbyist influence while keeping an eye on how government responds to things like his federal hiring freeze.