‘On My Mind Were the Numerous Lawsuits Pending Against the President for Everything From Violations of the Constitution to Conflict of Interest’
The first appointed ethics and compliance watchdog in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Division Fraud Section resigned out of frustration late last month citing a “cognitive dissonance” she “could not overcome” that was created by the Trump administration.
Hui Chen in a June 26 LinkedIn post explained, “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[s] on the Titanic.”
An ethics and compliance activist, speaker, writer, and consultant, Hui previously served as an Assistant United States Attorney, as well as a corporate counsel for Fortune 500 companies including Microsoft and pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. She has been actively taking issue with the handling of DOJ inquiries and investigations of corporations.
“I engaged in those questioning and evaluations, on my mind were the numerous lawsuits pending against the President of the United States for everything from violations of the Constitution to conflict of interest, the ongoing investigations of potentially treasonous conducts, and the investigators and prosecutors fired for their pursuits of principles and facts. Those are conducts I would not tolerate seeing in a company, yet I worked under an administration that engaged in exactly those conduct. I wanted no more part in it.â€
The DOJ’s Fraud Section was first created in 2015 by the Obama Administration. As reported by International Business Times Sunday, Chen came to the Justice Department in 2015, after officials there created a compliance counsel position to help guide the agency’s enforcement of criminal laws against corporations.
A Justice department announcement at the time said Chen would guide the fraud section of the Criminal Division in “the prosecution of business entities, including the existence and effectiveness of any compliance program that a company had in place at the time of the conduct giving rise to the prospect of criminal charges, and whether the corporation has taken meaningful remedial action.†The release also said Chen would help the department make sure that corporations who had negotiated agreements with prosecutors were following through on their commitments to stop violating laws.
Chen, who speaks Mandarin Chinese, Italian and Russian, writes that she will now move forward in the private sector.
“The mission is the same: to make a difference. It seems clear that there is much work to do not only in taking corporate ethics & compliance to the next level, but also in raising the moral consciousness of societies.â€
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