July 2017

The director of the independent Office of Government Ethics, who has been the federal government’s most persistent critic of the Trump Administration’s approach to ethics, announced that he is resigning nearly six months before his term is scheduled to end. Walter M. Shaub Jr. repeatedly challenged the Trump administration, publicly urging President Trump to fully divest from his business empire and chastising a senior Trump adviser for violating ethics rules. His outspokenness drew the ire of administration officials and earned him near-cult status among Trump’s opponents. Fans started a Facebook page in his honor, and his name has occasionally appeared on posters at anti-Trump protests. Shaub made no reference to those clashes in a resignation letter he posted Thursday indicating he will step down July 19. Instead, he praised the work of federal ethics officials, pointedly noting their commitment to “protecting the principle that public service is a public trust, requiring employees to place loyalty to the Constitution, the laws, and ethical principles above private gain.” In an interview, Shaub said he was not leaving under pressure, adding that no one in the White House or the administration pushed him to leave. But the ethics chief said he felt that he had reached the limit of what he could achieve in this administration, within the current ethics framework.

Even some of the tech industry’s most prominent critics of President Donald Trump are opening their checkbooks and donating to Republican lawmakers, as Silicon Valley sets its sights on the 2018 midterm election. With the entire House on 2018’s ballot — and about one-third of the US Senate up for a vote, too — the stakes are high for those in the Bay Area who seek to erode the GOP’s control of Congress and erect a new bulwark against Trump’s agenda in areas like immigration and climate change. But some of the region’s most politically active executives — including Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet; and Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX — have contributed generously to Republicans in recent months in a bid to maintain steady relationships with both parties.

The US State Department wants to team up with other government agencies and Hollywood in a bid to create a "fake Twitter feud" about the importance of intellectual property rights. As part of this charade, the State Department's Bureau of Economic Affairs says it has been seeking the participation of the US Office of Intellectual Property Enforcement, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, the US Patent and Trademark Office, and "others."

To make the propaganda plot seem more legitimate, the State Department is trying to enlist Stanford Law School and "similar academic institutions" to play along on the @StateDept feed on Twitter. "We're not going to participate," said Mark Lemley, the director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science, and Technology at Stanford Law School. He recently received an e-mail and a telephone call from the State Department seeking his assistance. "Apparently there is not enough fake news for the US government," Lemley told his Facebook followers. On the Facebook post, he redacted the name of the official who sent him the letter out of privacy interests. The RIAA declined comment, as did the trademark office. The MPAA said it is not participating.

Chip maker Qualcomm is asking US trade authorities to ban imports of Apple products, including iPhones, that don’t use its processors. Qualcomm said it will formally request that the US International Trade Commission (ITC) temporarily ban the imports to “stop Apple’s unlawful and unfair use of Qualcomm’s technology.”

The company is accusing Apple of infringing on its patents. “Qualcomm’s inventions are at the heart of every iPhone and extend well beyond modem technologies or cellular standards,” Qualcomm general counsel Don Rosenberg said in a statement. “The patents we are asserting represent six important technologies, out of a portfolio of thousands, and each is vital to iPhone functions. Apple continues to use Qualcomm’s technology while refusing to pay for it.” The chip maker is also suing Apple to prevent it from selling any of products that have already been imported.