What’s Next for a Trump-Era Corruption Watchdog?
Tips on how to keep your head from exploding before it's absolutely necessary.
A WEEK AFTER ELECTION DAY, when the unimaginable invaded and conquered reality, I emerged from my stupor and talked to someone I thought might have constructive thoughts on coping: Noah Bookbinder, a former public corruption prosecutor at the Justice Department who is now president and CEO of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington—a watchdog organization that targets corruption in American government through investigations and legal actions.
With a mission like that, Bookbinder and CREW can’t simply burrow under the covers for the next four years and hope for the best. They endured Donald Trump’s first term, so they’re preparing for the worst.
It was January 15, 2021 when CREW released a report called “President Trump’s legacy of corruption, four years and 3,700 conflicts of interest later.” He never divested from his business interests and made uncounted millions from the money foreign and domestic players spent on his clubs, hotels and real estate—at least $5.5 million from China alone, based on a limited and partial House Oversight Committee investigation that Republicans halted when they took control of the chamber in January 2023.
This week, the CREW homepage featured an August 2024 report on “the intensifying threat of Donald Trump’s emoluments.” That’s the term used in the Constitution for corruption and self-enrichment. In other words, we can expect the president-elect to reach new heights of both during his second administration.
First off, Bookbinder tells me, “Trump has already eroded a lot of checks and balances, and starts from a potentially riskier place there.” On top of that, he adds, Trump now has social media and crypto holdings that are particularly concerning. Any wealthy person or foreign country who wants to influence or get a favor from Trump could drive up his net worth by buying a ton of stock, or drive it down by threatening to sell. “In terms of the ability to really throw big money around to him or in his direction, the social media and crypto are really sort of unprecedented,” Bookbinder says.
The night before our conversation, I dictated some possible questions for Bookbinder in an email to myself:
You’ve filed lawsuits. You’ve filed complaints. You’ve given testimony. You’ve done reports and investigations. You’ve documented the corruption and the conflicts and the blatant violations of ethics and laws and codes. What can we do about this? How will it end? Will the historical record be enough? What if that is all we ever have?
When I joked with Bookbinder about working myself into a frenzy with these and other questions, he reminded me that we have more than mere documentation and a record from Trump’s first term. “You know, we didn’t lose. We actually got some good court decisions,” he said.
For the record: CREW won a clearcut victory for accountability in a case that removed and banned from office a New Mexico county commissioner who had participated in the Capitol riot on January 6th. It won many findings of Hatch Act violations, in which White House aides used their taxpayer-funded positions to promote Trump or disparage Democrats, including a recommendation that Kellyanne Conway be fired. And various courts kept its emoluments suit alive throughout Trump’s term.
But Conway was never fired, and the Supreme Court dismissed three emoluments cases, including CREW’s, when Trump left office. “It depends on how you look at it,” Bookbinder concedes. “There’s been nothing more frustrating than watching institution after institution evade responsibility and fail to hold Donald Trump accountable”—from the Senate’s failure to convict him in the 2021 impeachment trial for inciting the January 6th attack and trying to stay in power, to a Supreme Court attitude he characterizes as “‘let somebody else do something about this, let the voters do it.’ In the end nobody did. It’s incredibly, incredibly disheartening.”
Bookbinder says he’s “ever hopeful” that second-term Trump won’t resume his push to destroy democratic norms. If that happens, he predicts Congress and the courts will hold the line: “There’s a path through it and out of it. But we haven’t made things easy for ourselves” by letting him “get away with so much” to this point.
What would worry him most, Bookbinder says, is Trump launching investigations into perceived enemies. Also on the worry list: the mass firing of federal civil service employees, to be replaced by Trump loyalists, and mass pardons for the rioters who attacked police and the Capitol on January 6th. Trump vowed repeatedly to deliver on all three if he won.
There may be some legal avenues to pursue, but the promised January 6th pardons are another matter. If Trump follows through, it would be “a huge red flag for democracy in the United States. It would be sending the signal that violent attempts to overturn elections are okay as long as you’re on the side of the person who ends up in power,” Bookbinder says. “Whether there’s anything legally to be done, we will look at every angle. But that’s a very broad presidential power.”
As for that historical record I mentioned rather dismissively, Bookbinder calls it very important. He urges President Joe Biden to release as many records as possible from both his administration and Trump’s first term.
What else can be done before Biden leaves office? CREW suggested in an August 7 letter that he fill all federal ethics vacancies—fourteen open slots for inspectors general (the agency watchdogs who investigate waste, fraud, and abuse) and other “vacancies in key ethics roles throughout the government.” Trump will have authority to fire inspectors general and replace them with loyalists, Bookbinder says, “but it’s not super easy to do,” and the president-elect shouldn’t get a pass.
Beyond that, Bookbinder says CREW is not rushing into battle. “We are not in a place of ‘let’s do what we did before, throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.’ We want to be strategic, think about what could be legally successful or successful in driving public opinion.” The wise course, he says, is to wait for Trump to take office: “I’m not positive that yelling and screaming in the next couple of months about the kinds of things that Trump might do will move a lot of people. But if and when stuff starts happening, there will be an audience for that.”
What kind of “stuff”? Oh, say, “if he uses the presidency to make his social media holdings and his crypto holdings more valuable and line his pockets,” Bookbinder says, “or if money is coming in from Saudi Arabia and China.”
Patience. Planning. Preparation. As a writer and editor of literally thousands of Trump columns over nearly a decade, as a citizen in disbelief at what so many Americans have forgotten or buried about Trump 1.0, and as a person still mired in election-recovery mode, I appreciate Bookbinder’s steady, measured approach. Trump is roiling brains like mine with his personnel plans, but they aren’t reality yet. We have a temporary respite, if we can keep it.
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