White House senior Ethics Lawyer, James Schultz, resigned last week to return to the private sector, after serving as the deputy for nearly a year.
Schultz will be returning home to Philadelphia, where his family still resides, to resume working for the law firm, Cozen O’Connor. During his time in the White House, his duties had consisted of the work on transportation and contracting-related executive orders, as well as on the judicial and U.S. attorney nominations in the states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
Schultz’s duties will now be taken over by the Associate Counsel, Scott Gast, who had previously worked at the House’s Office of Congressional Ethics, before joining the White House in January this year.
Schultz further told the news reporters that his resignation was spurred by his own desire to get back into private law work and get back to his family in Philadelphia.
“I was interested in continuing with private practice and saw this as a tremendous opportunity to go serve and get things up and running, and the plan was to move on about this time. These are typically year-to-about-18-months-type positions,” Schultz had said in a statement.
He further added that he is more than willing to join the televised debate to talk “about the good work the Trump administrations is doing” but has plans to “have a robust law practice.”
“That’ll be something I’d be willing to do, certainly, getting out and talking about the good work the Trump administration is doing on these issues,” he had said. “I will be out, but I don’t plan to make a career out of being a pundit on TV. I’m planning to have a robust law practice.”
Schultz also revealed that he had agreed to an ethics pledge that was required by the Trump administration, and which imposes a five-year-long ban on becoming a registered lobbyist and another lifetime ban on being a foreign lobbyist.
Ultimately, Schultz saw the “real legacy” of his time in the administration being his work on the judicial nominations.
“I look at the judges as a real legacy in changing the face of the courts and putting originalists into those positions,” Schultz had said. “That’s something where even now we can look back and say, ‘we had some real impact.'”
