Director of the Office of Government Ethics Walter Shaub, Jr. sat down with CBS correspondent Julianna Goldman on Thursday to explain why he will be resigning from his position effective July 19.
Goldman reported that Shaub was nominated by former President Barack Obama for a five-year term that was supposed to end in January, but President Donald Trump kept him on despite multiple clashes.
"My current experience with this [Trump] administration has taught me that the ethics program need to be stronger than it is," Shaub said.
Shaub told CBS that unless Trump eliminates all financial ties to his businesses, the American people will never know whether his policies are in the best interest of the country or financially beneficial for him.
"Do you think the president and his family are using the office to enrich themselves?" Goldman asked Shaub.
"I can't know what their intention is," Shaub said. "I know that the effect is that there's an appearance that the businesses are profiting from his occupying the presidency. And appearance matters as much as reality. So even aside from whether or not that's actually happening, we need to send a message to the world that the United States is gonna have the gold standard for an ethics program in government, which is what we've always had."
Goldman clarified whether Shaub was saying he could not be sure about Trump's intentions.
"You can't be sure, and so it almost doesn't matter whether they are profiting or not," Shaub continued. "America should have the right to know what the motivations of its leaders are, and they need to know that financial interests, personal financial interests, aren't among them."
CBS reported that the OGE usually operated under the radar in previous administrations, but that Schaub changed that tradition by sarcastically tweeting about Trump divesting his assets shortly after he defeated Hillary Clinton last November.
"In many ways, what I was really trying to do with that is communicate with the president using the medium that I saw him communicate in," Shaub said.
Shaub said in his resignation letter to Trump that it was a "great privilege and honor" to lead the OGE's staff and community of ethics officials.
— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) July 6, 2017