Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
9-2026
Abstract
That was quite a week. Over seven days in mid-October:
- President Trump hosted a White House dinner for three dozen super-wealthy individuals and representatives of major corporations who pledged funds for his $300 million ballroom.
- The president commuted the sentence of former Congressman George Santos, who had served less than three months of an 87-month term for corruption, and canceled Santos’s obligation to pay restitution to his victims.
- The president fired, without providing a reason or giving the 30 days’ notice required by law, the Inspector General for the Export-Import Bank.
- We learned the president is demanding the Department of Justice pay him $230 million in compensation for federal investigations into his alleged misconduct while a private citizen.
- The president pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, who had previously pleaded guilty to money laundering violations. Binance is a business partner of World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture launched last year by the Trump family.
Disciplines
Administrative Law | Law | President/Executive Department
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Richard Briffault,
The Threat to Government Ethics,
Democracy's Challenges: 100 Ideas, Bob Bauer, Richard Pildes, Rosa Po & Samuel Issacharoff (Eds.), NYU Press
(2026).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/4881
COinS
Comments
File includes extracted endnotes (p. 444).