The Lost Art of Resigning in Protest
Public servants used to quit on principle. Now, they leak to Bob Woodward and write op-eds in <em>The New York Times.</em>
The Trump administration was barely six months old when Walter Shaub decided that he could not abide its corruption any longer, that his job as the federal ethics watchdog had been neutered by the regime’s mockery of ethics. Then he did something exceedingly rare in Washington: He resigned in protest, and explained himself on national television. In an interview with ABC News, he said: “I really always thought that the ethics rules were strong enough to protect the integrity of the government’s operations … until now.”
Fourteen months later, the ex-director of the Office of Government Ethics tells me, “I felt it was important to be open and transparent about it. The Trump administration was failing to follow
