Walter Shaub told Rep. Jason Chaffetz that he’s happy to talk — he just wants to do it in public. | POLITICO Illustration Chaffetz to get meeting he demanded with ethics official who criticized Trump

House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz and Office of Government Ethics director Walter Shaub will meet privately next week to discuss Shaub’s ongoing public criticism of Donald Trump.

Last week, House Oversight panel chief Jason Chaffetz threatened to subpoena the government’s top ethics official for a private meeting over the criticism. And this week, the ethics official told the powerful Utah Republican congressman that he’s happy to talk — he just wants to do it in public.


“Through staff, I requested that meeting be open to the public. I recently received word from your Chief of Staff that you are not able to accommodate that request. I write to ask you to reconsider,” Office of Government Ethics director Walter Shaub wrote in a letter to the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

“Allowing the public to attend our meeting — or, at the very least, to view it through live broadcast or the attendance of the news media — would ensure transparency and educate the public about how OGE guards the executive branch against conflicts of interest,” he added, though noting he would agree to a private meeting if Chaffetz again refused to speak in front of an audience.

But on Thursday, Chaffetz office said he and Shaub would meet privately on Monday, Jan. 23.

The request for a public meeting is the latest turn in an escalating feud pitting Shaub against Chaffetz and the Trump administration.

It’s also part of a broader struggle over Shaub’s new order of operation under the Office of Government Ethics. The agency has typically operated in relative obscurity under past directors, but, dealing with a president elect who heads a vast business empire, the director has made a controversial break with precedent by adopting an increasingly public profile.

Since Trump’s election, Shaub has repeatedly pushed Trump to adopt a stringent policy to avoid conflicts of interest between his administration and his sprawling company. And when Trump last week rolled out an ethics arrangement that turned over the business to his adult sons but did not entirely divest him from the company, Shaub appeared publicly hours later to label the plan “meaningless from a conflict of interest perspective."

After the public rebuke, Chaffetz demanded a private meeting with Shaub and threatened to subpoena him if he refused to comply. He also criticized Shaub’s conduct, saying it ran contrary to the mission of his office.

“What they’re supposed to do is help work with somebody to comply with the ethics requirements. But when you talk publicly about private conversations, that’s not ethical,” the Utah Republican said in an interview.

Shaub says his public outreach is part of upholding his office’s responsibility to the public.

He reiterated that stance when he criticized Trump’s refusal to divest from his company.

“I wish circumstances were different and I didn’t feel the need to make public remarks today,” he said during his address at the Brookings Institution. “He’s going to be asking his own appointees to make sacrifices. He’s going to be asking our men and women in uniform to risk their lives in conflicts around the world. So, no, I don’t think divestiture is too high a price to pay to be the president of the United States of America.”

Shaub’s office worked with Trump’s team before the election and also during the transition on building strong ethics arrangements into the incoming administration. But internal OGE emails released through the Freedom of Information Act also show the ethics office and the Trump transition struggled to communicate during a critical 10-day period after the election.

In mid-November, Shaub even pleaded with incoming White House Counsel Don McGahn to return his calls and arrange a meeting so he could share his advice “based on past experiences.”

Shaub’s office was ultimately able to get back in touch with the Trump transition, though their work appears to have mainly centered around financial disclosures for many of Trump’s Cabinet nominees. The OGE chief did continue to hold out hope that Trump himself would shift course on his own personal financial arrangement and divest. But when that didn’t happen, Shaub made a last-minute decision to speak up about it, according to Norm Eisen, the former Obama White House ethics lawyer who had invited Shaub to speak at Brookings.

“He was pretty upset, as you heard,” Eisen said.

While the actual office Shaub leads does get to weigh in on the front end of key ethics and legal decisions in the staffing-up process, it lacks legal authority to pursue government employees even if it believes they’ve run afoul of ethics rules, leaving Shaub’s remarks as perhaps his best way to influence the president-elect.

And Shaub has been promising to be a public voice since his own 2012 nomination hearing , testifying that, if confirmed, he’d “highlight that there are consequences when people do break the rules.”

Shaub was an uncontroversial pick then. His confirmation hearing was attended by only one senator — Hawaii Democrat Daniel Akaka — and he was confirmed by unanimous voice vote.

Nonetheless, his public push has come at a cost, both for Shaub personally and possibly for the 80-person agency he leads. Trump’s incoming White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, warned that Shaub should “be careful” after his lambasting of the president-elect. In his letter last week to Shaub demanding a private transcribed interview, Chaffetz noted his panel holds primary jurisdiction over the OGE and that its statutory authorization lapsed nearly a decade ago.

Many of OGE’s defenders said Chaffetz was sending a not-so-veiled threat to cut Shaub’s budget or perhaps even outright eliminate his office.

“It’s shocking retaliation,” Eisen said.

This isn’t the first time Shaub and Chaffetz have tangled. In 2015, the Utah congressman challenged the ethics official for giving Hillary Clinton a pass on conflict-of-interest laws over speaker fees she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, were supposed to disclose. Chaffetz has since added to his grievances, including going after Shaub for the bizarre series of Twitter posts the OGE chief ordered up soon after Trump’s victory, which prompted confusion and even a query from Twitter checking to make sure the office’s account had not been hacked.

The public feud between Shaub, Chaffetz and the Trump administration has left observers and veterans of the Office of Government ethics debating the current situation.

“My concern is that the agency could now be perceived as being political, which it has never been,” said Don Fox, a former OGE general counsel. With Chaffetz on the attack, Fox added that he hopes Shaub finds some Senate allies who will speak up against the House Republican “to say this is a bridge too far.”

Others say Shaub is going too far.

“What I find very troubling it’s really just a statement of opinion,” said Caleb Burns, a Republican ethics attorney. “For a government employee to go out there and express an opinion about what someone else in government is or isn’t doing, it’s remarkable. Especially since that opinion isn’t based in any potential legal issue that his agency would have authority to enforce.”

Others have noted Shaub’s status as an Obama appointee who donated $700 to his boss’s two presidential campaigns and cut a $100 check for Hillary Clinton back in 2007.

Shaub is one of the government’s leading experts on presidential transitions — no matter which party is coming into power. He’s been planning for Friday’s formal change in power since 2015, and he played pivotal roles helping both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations fill out their ranks.

And since Chaffetz criticized Shaub, he has become something of a cause célèbre among Trump critics — and even among some Republicans.

“I was impressed from the word go,” said Greg Walden, an attorney for Mitt Romney who delivered the Republican’s financial disclosure forms to Shaub during both the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. “He was a model of discretion.”

“He bent over backward to help the Bush administration,” said Richard Painter, a former Bush White House ethics lawyer.

Shaub’s defenders have also included Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the Obama White House and even “The Daily Show ,” which last week featured the OGE chief in a segment about Trump’s business conflicts that jokingly thanked the “soon to be unemployed ethics man.” A coalition of good government groups including Common Cause and the Sunlight Foundation also weighed in Tuesday in a letter to Priebus, calling his comments “highly inappropriate and an obvious effort to intimidate” Shaub.

“I thought his remarks were one of the most courageous things I’ve ever seen in government,” Eisen said. “He’s an anonymous career government official. In seven days, he’s going to be working for the most powerful man in the world, a billionaire known for a strong temper and taste for revenge.”