Jack Goldsmith
speaker
462 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 10 Sep
Jack Goldsmith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Conflict of interest rules are designed for the deep state.
These are people who are less competent and who are less expert at really getting things done.
I'm just telling you what the argument is.
And I think there's certainly something to be said for that theory in a world in which, and this is clearest in AI policy, but it's clear in other areas.
The government is going to have to be drawing on the private sector more and more for expertise, for technology, for innovation.
There's an argument for this new theory or Newton, I wouldn't say new conception, but for this other conception of complex theory.
But I think that's different from what, just to go back to where we started, I think that's different from weakening conflict of interest rules in the service of getting private sector people in the government to bring their expertise to bear.
That strikes me as quite different from Trump making money off of the UAE.
I'm pessimistic.
I mean, yes, especially, as you know, in the 1970s, following Watergate, following Vietnam, following church, especially Watergate on this front.
There was a... And then the country was for this, and that's the most important point.
There was a concerted effort to bring ethical rules to the presidency.
And it was not just Congress.
Congress did its bit with a whole bunch of statutes, some of which, like the Ethics in Government Act, which introduced the independent council, made things worse, not better, but a lot of which made things better.
But at the same time, and this is really important, there was a parallel track where presidents...
Starting with Gerald Ford and Ed Levy in the Justice Department, but then Jimmy Carter adopted a whole set of very important norms, which a norm is a rule of right reason that's not legally binding, but that...
if it works right, has political consequences if you don't follow it.
And those norms worked remarkably well for, say, the next 50 years.
And they were starting to frazzle.
I don't want to blame Trump only for the diminution of the norms or the blowing up of the norms, but in his first term, he tried and failed, and in his second term, they thought about it more, and they've massively succeeded on a scale that's hard to fathom.
Showing 281–300 of 462 · page 15 of 24
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