Rep. Dan Goldman Delivers Poignant Address on Corruption, Erosion of Accountability, and a Roadmap for Restoring Public Trust

New York, NY – Congressman Dan Goldman (NY-10) delivered the featured speech at New York Law School’s 199th CityLaw Breakfast titled, “Democracy on the Brink: Corruption and the Public Trust.”  

  

In a moment of historic political upheaval, Goldman issued a candid assessment of how public corruption and the erosion of guardrails and forms of accountability – on both sides of the political aisle and at every level of government – are threatening the very foundation of American democracy and the willingness of the public to buy into the American social contract.  

  

Drawing on recent cases, public opinion data, and a call to action for institutional reform, Congressman Goldman offered both a warning and a roadmap for restoring public confidence in government and the imperative of doing so to preserve liberal democracy. 

 

 

 

"We gather here today at a time when the very foundations of our democracy are enduring a stress test. 

 

To be sure, we are facing threats abroad from Russia, Iran and China, and partisan gridlock in Washington makes it incredibly difficult to govern as the framers imagined.  

 

But I’m not referring to those challenges, which are ones that our great nation has grappled with – and conquered – many times over our 250 year history.  

 

I’m instead talking about something far more insidious — something that corrodes from within and is a more significant existential threat to the future of the republic. That threat is naked, unbridled, and brazen corruption at the highest levels of our government.   

 

In so many ways, our founding fathers anticipated many potential obstacles and pitfalls in drafting the constitution – including the fundamental concept that the separation of powers among three branches of government would naturally provide the necessary checks and balances to preserve and protect the will of the people.  

 

Article One confers to Congress the power of the purse and the power to declare war.  

 

Article Two requires the Executive Branch to faithfully execute the laws passed by Congress and to oversee foreign relations. 

 

And Article III charges the judiciary with saying what the law is, properly insulated from political pressure by lifetime tenure for judicial appointees. 

 

This daring and innovative structure presupposed two assumptions that, if lacking, would crater the entire system:  

Sadly, we are witnessing the combination of these two conditions that has our system of government teetering on the brink. No President – not even Nixon – so disregarded the law and the constitution as Donald Trump does. And I can think of no majority in the Congress that has so completely turned over all of its own power and authority to a different branch of government as this Republican Congress has to President Trump.  

 

But this inflection point did not come out of nowhere. We can have as many laws and institutions as we want, but if the American people do not have trust that those laws are fairly and equally applied or that those institutions are placing the public good ahead of personal interests, then they aren’t worth the paper they are written on or the dilapidated buildings they reside in. 

Sadly, trust in elected representatives is at an all-time low. The National Election Study has been tracking public trust in government since 1958, when the percentage of Americans who said they trust the government to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time” was 73 percent. In 1964 it was 77 percent. 

 

Today, that number stands at a horrifying 22 percent. Only 2 percent of respondents say they trust the government to do what is right “just about always.” Two percent. Since 2007, the share of Americans saying they trust the government hasn’t broken 30 percent. 

And while Donald Trump has taken official corruption to new lows, he is only able to do that because the erosion of the public trust has been well underway for years – by both parties, especially here in New York. 

 

As the lead counsel in the first impeachment of Donald Trump for corruptly abusing his official power to try to coerce a foreign government to help his personal campaign, very little that Donald Trump does surprises me.  If there is anything that does, it is not that he is engaged in widespread abuse of his power for personal gain, but rather how openly and brazenly he is doing it.    

Take just a couple of examples. 

 

A few weeks ago, President Trump accepted a reported $400 million luxury jet from the royal family of Qatar without the consent of Congress — a clear violation of the Foreign Emoluments Clause, which requires Congress to consent to any foreign gift, title or emolument. Remember, President Ulysses S. Grant requested consent from Congress to receive the Statue of Liberty from France, and as far as I know it was never going to be used by Grant’s presidential library after he left office. 

 

President Trump openly bragged about the plane just a couple of days after he announced a $2 billion financial deal with the UAE in connection to a crypto stablecoin recently issued by his own crypto company, which yielded him hundreds of millions of dollars.  He literally announced this deal on his first official international trip.  

 

And he’s grifting at home too. He sold 25 VIP White House tours to the top 25 shareholders of his crypto company – without any known national security vetting – that saw the value of his shares go up by 50%.  

 

Yesterday, the Senate voted on stablecoin legislation that very well may make it to the resolute desk for his signature – yes, he might be asked to sign legislation that has a direct impact on his own financial interests.  

 

Remember when the public was outraged during his first term when he only ceased day-to-day involvement in the Trump Organization, rather than fully divesting his interests? 

 

Now he is soliciting foreign investments in his crypto company and selling White House tours to the largest investor, and there isn’t a hint of an investigation from the Department of Justice nor from the Republican majority in Congress. 

 

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Perhaps some of the reasons for such little outrage can be summed up in a statement I hear all the time: “oh, every politician is corrupt.” Too many people simply have come to accept an expectation that elected officials are corrupt and – someway, somehow – every politician is making money from his or her office. 

 

As frustrated as I get hearing that over and over, it’s hard to argue with.  
 

Just look here at our great city and state.  Our current mayor was charged last year for alleged honest services fraud and campaign finance violations tied to foreign money and influence. And while I do think the legal basis for the corruption charge was suspect, I couldn’t help but notice that the most common conversation I had with people about the Indictment began with the question, “is what he did really worthy of a federal indictment?”  

 

In other words, expectations are so low for politicians that some degree of corruption is expected and accepted, so much so that federal charges should be saved for only the most egregious conduct.  

 

Those who believe that are sadly in very good company: the Supreme Court also seems to believe that is what the law requires.  

The running joke nowadays is that in order to be convicted of federal corruption charges, the FBI needs to find gold bars in your closet. 

That of course is what happened to former Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, who was convicted of honest services fraud here in the Southern District of New York after accepting gold bars in exchange for a variety of official actions taken on behalf of the Egyptian government, which gave him the gold bars. 

 

We can be frustrated that the Supreme Court has repeatedly narrowed the reach of federal corruption law but it’s not actually a close call in their mind: just about every Supreme Court ruling from the McDonell opinion to the present has been unanimous, 9-0. That includes the Buffalo Billions case and Joe Percoco here in New York, and it caused both State Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to be retried before they were each ultimately convicted.   

 

The fact of the matter is that both Democrats and Republicans have repeatedly succumbed to personal greed over the public good.  And while Donald Trump is attacking all forms of political accountability – including weaponizing the Department of Justice to reward his allies and punish his enemies – the stage had long ago been set for a wannabe dictator like Trump to come along and take a battering ram to a rule of law that had been fraying at the edges for some time.   

 

The damage to our system goes far beyond any individual tragedy. It goes to the very foundation of our democracy.  

Democracy depends on a basic understanding: that we, the people, entrust elected officials with power in exchange for their service for the public good. That trust is not a given—it must be earned. And when those in power use their positions to enrich themselves, to favor allies, or to punish enemies, that contract begins to dissolve.  

 

That broken trust – that decaying social contract – is, in my view, what paved the way for the resurrection of the current resident of the White House. He has turned suspicion into toxic cynicism. He has turned facts into a partisan debate. He has used distrust of the system to frame himself as that system’s victim. 

 

The question asked is no longer whether politicians are true to their oaths of office. It is instead a question of moral relativism – is she as bad as he is? And once the average voter believes that all politicians are corrupt, that no facts can be trusted, that the pursuit of power justifies any means necessary, the foundations of our democracy crumble and we invite a dangerous new normal: where truth is optional, ethics are flexible, and accountability is partisan. 

 

There are many things to be concerned about these days.  We are dealing with many threats to the rule of law and our basic democratic values and foundations.

  

But I firmly believe that the path towards restoring faith in our government – in this great experiment that we call democracy – must start by addressing public corruption.  And that is not only through revising our criminal statutes but also by altering the structure of our electoral system. 

 

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So if you aren’t ready to crawl into a hole after that ever-so-uplifting recitation of the current state of distrust in our system, let me try to propose some ideas and solutions that can restore confidence in our elected officials – and, by extension, our government.  

First, voters must see a renewed commitment to ethical government from candidates for office. Donald Trump has normalized the once-heretic idea that a President of the United States does not believe in the constitution. That must end, and it must end now. Not just by following the law, but by holding politicians to a higher standard – and by those within the same party.  

 

It frustrates me to no end when I hear people say that some alleged misconduct is okay because the official was not criminally charged or convicted.  That is not the standard we should hold each other to.  

 

A criminal conviction is an incredibly high standard – 12 unanimous jurors must find beyond a reasonable doubt that the admissible evidence was sufficient to meet every legal element of the charge.  That must not be – it can not be – the standard that elected representatives are held to.  

 

Second, we must set an example by setting guardrails for ourselves. 

 

Take stock trading by members of Congress.  I’ve been in Congress about two and a half years, and I’m confident that I haven’t received a single piece of confidential information through my official duties that would have helped me play the market.  But it doesn’t matter – because simply the appearance of receiving confidential information is more than enough to raise questions about whether that information was used in connection with trading stocks by members for their personal gain. 

 

And that’s simply why members of Congress should not be permitted to buy and sell individual stocks.  

When I came into Congress, I sold all of my individual stocks and put my money in a blind trust. But that should be the norm, not the exception. We must pass a law prohibiting individual stock trading by members of Congress.  We can set an example for ourselves. 

There are other actions that we can take to restore trust in our democracy and our elected officials. 

 

We must eliminate big money in politics – at a minimum there must be full transparency in campaign finance. No more dark money. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.  

 

We must set clear rules and guidelines on gifts and conflicts of interests – and there must be consequences for violating them.  

Similarly, we can no longer trust that our elected officials – especially our president – will view the plain language of the Constitution as binding. So we must pass legislation that not only creates an enforcement vehicle for the Emoluments Clause, the Hatch Act, and other ethics laws and rules, but imposes consequences as well.    

    

I believe we must draft legislation to codify the independence of the Department of Justice from personal influence by the President.  The evisceration of the Public Integrity Section, the firing of so many apolitical and upstanding career prosecutors, Executive Orders by the President directing the FBI to investigate political enemies – all must be addressed and prohibited.  That is the stuff of banana republics, not a constitutional republic.  

 

And finally, we need to rewrite federal public corruption law, which I am in the process of working on right now. The Supreme Court has repeatedly urged Congress to revise the corruption statute, and I plan to take them up on their suggestion. Every branch of government – elected officials, prosecutors, and judges – must have a clear understanding of what is – and is not – official corruption. 

But restoring faith in our system is going to take more than these specific and tangible legislative objectives. We can’t predict every possible ethics violation or potential corrupt deal. The voters – the people – must have higher expectations of their elected officials, and must hold them accountable. 

 

I ran for Congress to preserve and protect our democracy and ensure that the rule of law remains our nation’s guiding light. And I believe that if we are honest with the public, accountable in our actions, uncompromising in what we expect of ourselves, and courageous in our convictions, we can restore the trust that has been lost. 

 

But that work starts with integrity. It starts with doing the right thing, not the easy thing. It starts with a willingness to look the American public in the eye, to admit the fault of those we share this awesome responsibility with, and to pledge that we can, we must, we will do better. 

 

History is watching."