Trevor Potter Speaks to The New York Times on Trump's New Ethics Adviser

The Trump Organization has announced that it has appointed an internal  legal team to handle compliance and ethics matters. The team includes Bobby Burchfield, a longtime Republican Party lawyer and corporate litigator, as an “independent ethics adviser.” The Trump Organization pointed to the move as a sign of its commitment to addressing questions about potentially unethical behavior by the Organization while Donald Trump is President.

Trevor Potter, a former Republican chairman of the Federal Election Commission, commended Mr. Burchfield as a “very good lawyer” and a “competent litigator,” but said a better choice, from a conflicts standpoint, would have been a nonpartisan federal judge.

“He is very much a Republican insider,” said Mr. Potter, who now leads the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit focused on campaign finance. “He was undoubtedly picked in part because he has a history of being a reliable Republican lawyer, a partisan who has represented the party in a number of suits. So he is not an outsider.”  Mr. Potter also leads the Political Law team at Caplin & Drysdale.

To view the full article, please visit The New York Times’ website.

Excerpt taken from the article “‘It Is Unacceptable’: Ethics Doubts Swirl as Trump Club Doubles Fee” by Steve Eder and Eric Lipton for The New York Times.