With help from Daniel Lippman PROGRAMMING NOTE: We’ll be off for Thanksgiving this Thursday and Friday but back to our normal schedule on Monday, Dec. 2. GOOD, BUT NOT GOOD ENOUGH: President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team has finally struck an agreement with the White House to better facilitate the handoff in power from the Biden administration in exchange for several concessions on ethics and transparency issues. — But Trump’s transition is still operating in uncharted waters in terms of adherence to modern ethics norms, said watchdog groups still underwhelmed by the commitments announced yesterday. — The Trump team’s pact with the White House ends a monthslong standoff that had prevented transition staffers from any formal contact with the federal agencies they will soon assume control of. But the transition’s announcement indicated it will refuse millions of dollars worth of federal funding and government resources for the massive undertaking — and the strings that come along with it aimed at preventing conflicts of interest. — The transition will continue to run solely on funds from private donors in order to “save taxpayers’ hard-earned money,” it said, allowing the transition to continue skirting a $5,000 cap on donations as a condition of accepting federal resources. — That explanation didn’t fly with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has pushed changes in presidential transition rules. “The reliance on private donors to fund the transition is nothing more than a ploy for well-connected Trump insiders to line their pockets while pretending to save taxpayers money,” she wrote on X. — “Money is a way to purchase influence,” said Delaney Marsco, the director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center. “So it is troubling if there’s this weird, unregulated way that essentially anybody can just give money to the president.” — “You can imagine … the type of people who are going to be able to give many, many thousands of dollars to the transition,” she added. “It raises a lot of questions about influence and who’s influencing the process.” — Contributions are “supposed to be limited to $5,000 per donor, so donors wouldn’t be buying favors from the president,” noted Craig Holman, an ethics and campaign finance lobbyist at Public Citizen, which has raised multiple ethical concerns related to Trump’s transition team in just the past day. Trump “totally eschewed all of that,” he said. — Trump’s team did say that the transition will maintain a policy “already in place” to not accept donations from foreign nationals and that it would disclose the names of its funders — moves it would not otherwise have been subject to as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. — The transition did not provide a timeline for those disclosures, however, and did not respond to questions from PI about when donors would be revealed prior to publication. Under the Presidential Transition Act, a list of transition donors must be disclosed to the GSA within 30 days of the president’s swearing in. — “We, as members of the public, need to trust that there aren’t people trying to inappropriately influence the process in some way,” said Marsco. “Without the safeguards of these limits and these disclosure requirements, there’s a serious risk that the public is going to be a little bit in the dark about what’s going on.” — Trump’s team also agreed to publicly share its plan for mitigating conflicts of interest for transition staffers and its guardrails for the handling of classified and nonpublic information shared with the transition. Already the transition has dealt with such an incident, after lawyers determined that top Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn had sought payments from those seeking jobs in the administration in exchange for promotion. — Any transition staffers who are not currently government employees are not bound by federal ethics laws, Marsco noted, underscoring the importance of knowing how Trump’s team is working to avoid conflicts and preventing staff from profiting off their role. “The ethics plan is really kind of all we have to secure the public’s trust in this process,” Marsco argued. — Even so, Marsco and Holman said there is plenty to be desired in the plan. For one, the plan does not describe what steps the president-elect himself will take to avoid any conflicts. It also doesn’t go much further than the law’s broad requirements for addressing how the transition would handle registered lobbyists and foreign agents. — “It’s really not worth the paper it was written on,” Holman said of the framework. He noted that there’s another motivation for instituting stringent ethics policies beyond retaining the public’s trust during the handoff of power: giving potential nominees a heads-up about their conflicts of interest gives them an opportunity to address such issues before moving into the government. Happy Wednesday and welcome to PI. We’re thankful for all of our readers, but especially the ones who send tips: coprysko@politico.com. And be sure to follow me on X: @caitlinoprysko. TRUMP’S LATEST REVOLVING DOOR HIRE: Trump has picked Jamieson Greer, the former chief of staff to Trump’s first U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, to serve as USTR in his second administration. Greer left the first Trump administration in 2020 to join the law and lobbying firm King & Spalding, where he was registered to lobby for one client from 2022 until earlier this year, disclosures show. — Greer reported lobbying the House, Senate and his former office on behalf of the U.S. subsidiary of Webuild, an Italian construction group, which had been embroiled in an international arbitration dispute. — As PI has recapped previously, Greer is the latest in a line of revolving door hires filling out Trump’s nascent administration — which now includes former lobbyists named as Trump’s chief of staff and White House counsel as well as his nominees for Transportation secretary and attorney general. MEET THE NEIGHBOR: “Few people in America have done more to advance conservative causes than” Leonard Leo, the conservative lawyer whose work in recent years “has helped reshape the U.S. courts and Republican politics” and transformed him “into a hero to conservatives and a villain to liberals,” The Associated Press’ Dan Merica writes. — “But for his neighbors on a sparsely populated island off the coast of Maine, the equation is more complicated. Leo and his family moved to Mount Desert Island in 2020, seeking a relatively anonymous life among its unpretentious year-round residents. A refuge it has not turned out to be.” — “The conservative’s presence — despite significant charitable giving to local nonprofits and big spending locally — has generated fissures in a place known for tranquility. That anxiety has only spiked since Trump’s victory.” DONOR PERKS: “In recent days, an invitation from people affiliated with American Values 2024, a super-PAC that supported Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign, has been sent to people in his sphere offering ‘cocktails and dinner’ with Kennedy at Mar-a-Lago,” Mother Jones’ Anna Merlan reports. — “The invitation refers to Kennedy as ‘incoming secretary, Health & Human services,’ although Kennedy has not yet been formally nominated, let alone confirmed by the Senate for that position.” — “The price of enjoying Kennedy’s company at the fundraiser, set to take place on the Trump-owned club’s Lakeview Terrace, is $25,000 each, or $40,000 for a couple. Experts on federal election law say that such a bald exchange—a large donation in exchange for access to a powerful incoming government official—is technically legal, but ethically ill-advised.” LIFE IN PLASTIC: “Paid influencers on TikTok. An infomercial hosted by Dennis Quaid. Pushback against the Olympics’ single-use plastic ban. A trove of documents leaked from an influential industry group shows how some of the world’s largest petrochemical and plastics companies have been waging a campaign to push back against a ‘tide of anti-plastic sentiment’ — especially among young people concerned about the environment,” per The New York Times’ Hiroko Tabuchi. — “The industry group, the National Association for PET Container Resources, or NAPCOR, worked to deliberately obscure its connection to the campaign and make its content ‘authentic and from the creators’ viewpoints,’ the documents show.” — “The corporate strategizing laid out in the documents provides a behind-the-scenes look at a battle being waged over the future of plastic. Nations are gathering in Busan, South Korea this week to hammer out details of a global plastic treaty that might tackle pollution at its source, by limiting its production — an approach that the plastic industry has vehemently opposed.”
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