While running for president, then-Senator Obama promised to clean up Washington with “the most sweeping ethics reform in history.” He papered up that promise pretty well, too, imposing tough ethics rules on his first day in office. Like any compliance program, however, the devil is in the follow-through, and when it comes to political ethics, the administration seems to have fallen way short of its early lofty rhetoric.
After President Obama decried the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 as opening “the floodgates for … foreign corporations to spend without limit in our elections,” multiple reports in recent weeks indicate that his campaign accepted illegal foreign contributions, or at least has been willfully blind to the origin of its donations.
