Why Bush’s Former Ethics Lawyer Is Suing Trump

If Obama had been party to similar conflicts “we would have impeached him in two weeks,” says Richard Painter, a former ethics attorney for George W. Bush. Painter is one of the attorneys on a lawsuit filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), in the Southern District of New York. He’s being accused of publicity-hounding, petulance, bad judgment, lack of standing, and of pushing a cause that people simply don’t care about. They will, Painter maintains, if and when a crisis arises. “If Franklin Roosevelt had had Roosevelt Towers in Berlin and Frankfurt and a $350 million revolving loan with Deutsche Bank in Germany in December 1941, what would he have done about going to war?”