The Justice Department has lost one of its top corporate ethics lawyers because trying to enforce laws against corporate crime while working for the Trump administration finally busted her own personal irony meter. Hui Chen left her position as Compliance Counsel Expert in the DOJ’s Fraud Section in June after deciding she couldn’t really fight corporate fraud while working for a fraudster. A former corporate attorney and federal prosecutor, Chen wrote a post on LinkedIn about her decision to leave the DOJ:
First, trying to hold companies to standards that our current administration is not living up to was creating a cognitive dissonance that I could not overcome. To sit across the table from companies and question how committed they were to ethics and compliance felt not only hypocritical, but very much like shuffling the deck chair on the Titanic.
Not quite the right analogy, we’d say; maybe it was more like being a condom inspector in a porcupine colony? In any case, Chen tired of examining and questioning corporations’ ethical behavior while having in mind the “numerous lawsuits pending against the President of the United States for everything from violations of the Constitution to conflict of interest,” not to mention his habit of firing watchdogs. The Trump administration’s routine way of doing business involved conduct “I would not tolerate seeing in a company, yet I worked under an administration that engaged in exactly those [sic] conduct. I wanted no more part in it.”
Chen also said her ability to do her job had been undercut by the administration in even more practical terms, since she was not allowed to speak publicly:
Second, my ability to do good at a more micro-level, by exchanging ideas with the compliance community on ways to assess the effectiveness of compliance programs, was severely limited. The management of the Criminal Division, of which the Fraud Section is a part, has persistently prohibited me from public speaking.
But golly, can you blame them? She was obviously some kind of weird Ethics Malcontent, based on some of her Tweets:
Additionally
Chen said now that she’s no longer trying to check corporations for ethical rot while having a desk in the swamp, she hopes to help really clean things up, from the outside:
I have come to realize that nothing matters to me more than working to restore the notions of integrity, decency, and intellect back into our government. I yearn to be a part of that effort more directly than volunteering for and attending protests: I want to help elect candidates who stand for those values.
She plans to work with efforts to improve ethics and compliance within corporations and in government, and to “participate in efforts to hold our elected representatives accountable and to protect our environment.”
So we’re guessing we can look forward to Donald Trump tweeting that Hui Chen is an Obama-hugging loser who simply couldn’t cut it, as demonstrated by the fact that once she left government, she couldn’t even get hired by Goldman-Sachs.
Chen’s position at the DOJ is expected to be filled by a Mr. B. Madoff.
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[International Business Times / LinkedIn / Radical Compliance]
