The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has taken the lead in the past in demanding ethical accountability from President Donald Trump and his White House staff. Now they are firing an ethics complaint against the president's son-in-law and influential adviser, Jared Kushner.
According to National Journal managing editor Ben Pershing, CREW's ethics complaint claims that Kushner "appears to have failed to make the required disclosure of his ownership interest in an online real estate investment company called Cadre, and likely must divest from Cadre to prevent having a conflict of interest."
CREW also accused Kushner of most likely neglecting to disclose his ongoing relationship with Cadre in documents pertaining to his request for a certificate of divestiture.
"Kushner's failure to disclose his ownership in Cadre is very troubling. It appears to be one of his larger investments, not something he could easily overlook, and it is impossible to ensure that senior government officials are behaving ethically if they fail to disclose key assets," CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder said.
The CREW complaint also points out that Kushner hasn't divested.
The complaint against Kushner feeds into a news cycle that has cast an unflattering light on the White House's need to abide by ethical concerns. Former Justice Department official Hui Chen has resigned because of the "cognitive dissonance" she felt trying to hold private companies accountable for not abiding by standards that she believes the Trump White House is violating.
"To sit across the table from companies and question how committed they were to ethics and compliance felt not only hypocritical, but very much like shuffling the deck chair(s) on the Titanic," Chen wrote in a LinkedIn post. "Even as I engaged in those questioning and evaluations, on my mind were the numerous lawsuits pending against the President of the United States for everything from violations of the Constitution to conflict of interest... and the investigators and prosecutors fired for their pursuits of principles and facts."
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