Meet the Media’s Go-To Bush Lawyer for Trump Bashing

Anytime an ethics question surrounding President Donald Trump arises, it is a sure bet that Richard Painter will show up on CNN to decry the latest breach.

Most recently, it was this week to discuss a State Department blog post that critics contended amounted to an advertisement for Mar-a-Lago, the president’s Florida resort, which has been dubbed the “Winter White House.”

“That’s the kind of prank liberal media people pull.”

No matter that there is no evidence Trump had anything to do with the blog or that the State Department removed it. There was Painter, who served as President George W. Bush’s top ethics lawyer, onscreen with his counterpart from President Barack Obama’s administration, Norman Eisen.

“It’s just one more instance of use of public office for private gain,” Painter told CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer. “We don’t use the State Department to sell membership interests in Mar-a-Lago, which is a private club owned by the president, where membership costs $200,000 a year, I believe. That’s not the role of the State Department.”

Painter has been a fixture on cable news and in America’s most prominent newspapers since Trump’s election. He has blasted Trump for not doing enough to separate himself from his business interests, for declining to release his tax returns, and for supposed ties to Russia by Trump associates. He suggested that Attorney General Jeff Sessions belongs in jail for misleading the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearing.

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Almost always, news outlets identify Painter as Bush’s former ethics lawyer or a University of Minnesota law professor. Rarely, do readers and viewers get a sense that Painter is something other than a Republican lawyer courageously blowing the whistle on his own side.

Painter Backed Hillary
Painter supported Democrat Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign and serves on the board of directors of the left-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

“I’ve got a lot of concerns about Donald Trump,” he told Yahoo Global News anchor Katie Couric before the election. “I’m not going to let him anywhere near the nuclear button. I don’t think any Americans should. I think he has a dangerous personality. He’s said a number of things that are a threat to our democracy and the rule of law.”

Among Painter’s concerns was that Trump would not accept the results of the upcoming election — a particularly ironic gripe in retrospect, considering millions of progressives have spent the last five months refusing to accept the results of the election.

Painter, himself, refused to accept the results of the election. He wrote an op-ed calling on members of the Electoral College, pledged to Trump, to block him from the White House.

Painter insisted that Clinton was not his first choice and that he would have preferred a Republican. He gave Couric the names of three people who didn’t even run for president in 2016 — Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), 2012 nominee Mitt Romney, and Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio).

In August, Painter wrote that the alleged pay-for-play scheme at the Clinton Foundation was “a marginally relevant sideshow” to the larger problem of money in politics. In October, he filed an ethics complaint against FBI Director James Comey for informing Congress that he was reopening the investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified information as secretary of state.

“The FBI’s job is to investigate, not to influence the outcome of an election,” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed.

In addition, Painter’s Twitter feed is a steady diet of anti-Trump venom, not only on ethics matters but regarding policy proposals ranging from his tax plan to his choice for education secretary to his proposed budget cuts.

Tim Graham, director of media analysis at the Media Research Center, said it is disingenuous for news organizations to call Painter Bush’s former ethics lawyer without providing that other context.

“This description is accurate but at the same time, it’s misleading,” he said.

Graham said Republicans who criticize other Republicans often find themselves in demand by news producers in a way that Democrats who disparage other Democrats do not.

“It also was easy to look him [Painter] up on Twitter and see his anti-Trump rants,” he said. “Those are the types of ‘Republicans’ — put that in quote marks — that they want.”

CNN Pairs Painter With CREW Partner
It is especially misleading, Graham said, when new outlets pair Republican guests with Democrats who have the same message. CNN did that Tuesday when it put Painter on with Eisen to talk about the Mar-a-Lago story. Setting up a Republican ethics lawyer with a Democratic ethics lawyer presents the veneer of balance, he said.

Viewers hearing both men criticize Trump come away believing there is an anti-Trump consensus among ethics experts that does not exist, Graham said.

“That’s the kind of prank liberal media people pull,” he said.

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In this case, CNN did not disclose that Eisen and Painter, in fact, both serve on the board of the same organization: Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).  Rick Berman, a critic of that organization, said Painter’s association with the group is another indication of his left-wing leanings.

“Painter being invited to join CREW is the classic example of putting lipstick on a pig,” he said. “Painter may have been associated with the Bush administration, but now he’s associated with a left-wing, anti-Republican, radical group with a history that just scratching the surface leads you to distrust everything they say.”

Berman founded Berman & Co., which manages the Center for Consumer Freedom, an organization that maintains a website called “CREW Exposed.”

Berman noted that until December, Clinton surrogate David Brock served as executive director of CREW. After he stepped down, Painter and Eisen joined the board. But Berman said that before and after Brock, CREW has presented itself as a nonpartisan ethics organization that almost exclusively targets Republicans and derives funding from left-wing sources.

“The work product speaks for itself. Almost everything on its website either is anti-Republican or anti-Trump,” he said. “News organizations are either lazy or complicit in covering up Painter’s connections to CREW.”