HOMELAND SECURITY ADVISER SHAPED CYBER STRATEGY DESPITE FINANCIAL INTERESTS – By Sara Sirota (The Intercept) / January 28, 2022
White House officials’ stock divestments and recusals are hidden from public view, thanks to ethics law gaps and a lack of transparency from the Biden administration.
WHEN HOMELAND SECURITY adviser Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall joined the White House in January 2021, she held vested employee stock options at two growing companies in the cybersecurity industry. Cybersecurity was poised to be front and center for the Biden administration, given the massive breach of software company SolarWinds in 2020 that raised alarms about vulnerabilities in the U.S. government and economy. Sherwood-Randall signed a financial disclosure form pledging to divest her assets at Dragos and Resilience, for which she had served on the advisory boards, and had a recusal arrangement in place in the meantime to avoid a conflict of interest.
But Sherwood-Randall waited months to exercise the options, worth between $50,000 and $100,000 at Dragos and less than $15,000 at Resilience, according to a periodic transaction filing. The purchase occurred just before the Dragos options were set to expire — and just as the White House released a strategy to protect the U.S. electric grid from cyber attacks. A National Security Council, or NSC, spokesperson acknowledged that Sherwood-Randall had participated in the plan, even though Dragos reportedly monitors 70 percent of the U.S. electric grid for cyber intrusions and shares insights with the federal government through a program called Neighborhood Keeper.
“The optics are not good,” said Walter Shaub, senior ethics fellow at the Project on Government Oversight and former director of the Office of Government Ethics. “She chose to wait 85 days to exercise the stock options. They were vested. She could have sold them on January 20, the day she started her new job.”
CONTINUE > https://theintercept.com/2022/01/28/biden-adviser-ethics-laws-cybersecurity/
