You served for two years as George W. Bush’s ethics counsel. Since Donald Trump took office, you and a couple of other ethics experts have been in high demand, especially on cable TV. You may dislike Trump, but you have to admit, he’s been a boon to the ethics-industrial complex. Well, he certainly created a lot of attention on ethics issues. Previously, people would violate ethics rules, but it was not quite as rampant as what’s going on here. We’ve been through a phase somewhat like this before, during Watergate, when ethics was front and center in the news.

You were about 12 years old when Watergate happened. Were you paying attention as a kid? Oh, yeah, I was watching those hearings. I remember hearing a man named Archie Cox had been fired and asking, Who fired him? The president. What was he doing? Investigating the president. You figure that out: There’s something wrong with that.

Which of President Trump’s potential ethical violations bothers you the most? Well, that depends on how broadly you define ethics. If ethics is limited to financial conflicts of interest — that’s really what I did in the Bush White House — that’s a huge problem for me because Trump refused to sell his businesses. We don’t know where he’s getting his financing. All we know is he won’t share his tax returns. Certainly, since he was elected, things have blown up in areas relevant to ethics. It’s a scary situation if you have a president obstructing justice, particularly when it’s about whether his political campaign was infiltrated by a foreign adversary.