The turnover rate in Donald Trump’s White House is absolutely unprecedented. In his first year as president alone, Trump’s turnover rate was 34 percent. To compare, Ronald Reagan’s was 17 percent, George W. Bush’s was six percent, and President Obama’s was nine percent.
Now, yet another staffer is leaving. The White House attorney who oversees ethics for Trump officials announced his resignation on Wednesday, according to POLITICO. Stefan Passantino has been with the Trump White House since it first began and served as former White House Attorney Don McGahn’s second-in-command. McGahn resigned earlier this year.
POLITICO reports that:
‘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.’
In other words, as one advisor to the White House said, Passantino is “the clean-up guy.”
Norm Eisen, the White House ethics czar under President Obama, said he was not surprised.
‘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. No ethicist could thrive in that environment.’
Passantino has certainly not had an easy job. Having overseen ethics violations like Kellyanne Conway’s violation of the Hatch Act when she hawked Ivanka Trump’s products during an interview, private airplane travels charged to American taxpayers by officials like HHS Secretary Tom Price, and the non-stop ethics violations of former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.
Featured image via Flikr by Gage Skidmore under a Creative Commons license
