One of the White House’s top attorneys plans to leave the administration by the end of the summer, according to four people familiar with his plans.

The departure of Stefan Passantino, the deputy White House counsel responsible for policing ethics for Trump officials, will leave a huge hole in the White House’s legal operation, where the 51-year-old has operated as the number two to top attorney Don McGahn.


He’ll join the steady exodus of top White House officials who have left the Trump administration recently, after a grueling year-and-a-half. In Passantino’s case, the lawyer has been commuting between Washington and his family in Atlanta, friends say, and he had always planned to return home at around this point.

A longtime lawyer to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and partner at the law firm Dentons, Passantino joined the administration in its infancy in January 2017 and took on what many Trump allies have viewed as the unenviable task of enforcing ethics rules, including educating his colleagues – many of them new to government – about the multitude of requirements governing public servants.

“He’s the clean-up guy,” joked one close adviser to the White House.

Trump, who has declined to follow past presidential precedent and release his tax returns, has posed an unprecedented challenge by holding on to his personal business assets while in office. Critics, including those from past Republican administrations, have argued the administration has been happy to bend or altogether skirt ethical standards.

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“I am amazed he made it as long as he did. His client was the White House, but its head, the president, is as difficult an ethics subject as has ever occupied the Oval,” said Norm Eisen, the White House ethics czar in the Obama administration who’s emerged as a vocal critic of Trump. “No ethicist could thrive in that environment.”

Spending and conflict of interest scandals have plagued Trump’s Cabinet secretaries, past and present, including former HHS Secretary Tom Price, former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.

While the White House ethics czar has influence over the Cabinet secretaries, it does not have direct oversight over them. That responsibility lies with the ethics officers at each agency, OGE, and ultimately, the president, Eisen said.

Passantino has been an aggressive force for defending the Trump administration’s practices, its training programs, and its oversight over officials within the executive branch.

In various public letters, Passantino has tangled with Walter Shaub, the former director of the Office of Government Ethics from 2013 to July 2017, and the Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. That committee once asked McGahn specifically to look into Passantino’s conduct.

“I’m glad to hear he’s leaving. He is a nice guy – charming even, and easy to like on a personal level. I’d want him as a neighbor, but not as an ethics official,” said Shaub. “On a professional level, he has been openly hostile to the government ethics program, like nothing we’d ever seen. He’s done more harm than good in his brief stint in the White House. His detrimental influence on the government ethics program under the Trump administration was a factor in my decision to resign.”

Passantino declined to comment, as did the White House press office.

In a November 2017 interview with POLITICO, Passantino’s former colleague, Jim Schultz, argued that the Trump White House was “more onerous in making people divest and recuse than the agencies would have required.” Schultz left the White House counsel’s office last fall for a Philadelphia-based law firm after working closely with Passantino to set up the ethics office inside the White House.

But the typical practice of divesting business holdings upon assuming a top government post has not uniformly been followed throughout this administration.

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner earned at least $82 million in outside income in 2017 while serving as senior White House advisers, according to financial disclosure forms. Ethics experts have long worried that that type of income, drawn from real estate holdings and a stake in the Trump International Hotel in Washington D.C., opens up the officials to potential conflicts of interest – even if they’ve given up daily involvement in their businesses.

At least two top Trump aides have been chastised for violating the Hatch Act, which forbids government officials in the course of their daily jobs from becoming involved in political activities.

“He’s done a pretty good job under a lot of stressful circumstances. I think of him as a martyr,” said one outside lawyer who’s dealt with Passantino at the White House. “From the beginning, the Trump administration has not had a concept of the constraints people are under when they go into the government. You can’t lay all of that at his feet. I just think there is a culture that is just different, and the conflicts go way beyond what he can control, or what he has any say over.”

Allies of Passantino say he has not yet decided on his next step after he leaves the White House and say he’s been planning this departure quietly for months.

Regardless, they also have long argued that he held an impossible job in an administration where the president, his family, and friends do not like to be told “no.”

“If Stefan is telling someone no, it must be really bad,” said one close adviser to the White House. “He should have been telling people no more often.”

Marianne Levine contributed reporting.

