Lisa Rosenberg has spent much of her career focused on transparency and accountability, from both inside and outside the federal government. As counsel for the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee in 1997 and 1998, she organized an investigation into illegal activity during the 1996 election. But most of her work has come in the nonprofit sector, including leadership roles at the Center for Responsive Politics and the Sunlight Foundation. Rosenberg is now executive director of Open The Government, a nonpartisan coalition that works to limit government secrecy. Her answers have been edited for clarity and length.
What's the tweet-length description of your organization?
Open The Government advances policies that create a transparent, accountable and responsive government.
Describe your very first civic engagement.
I attended a pro-choice rally on the Mall when I first moved to Washington, D.C.
What was your biggest professional triumph?
Convincing my former boss Sen. John Kerry to vote the "right" way on a particular bill even though it was a politically hard decision for him to make.
And your most disappointing setback?
The acceptance by too many of anti-democratic, corrupt policies and practices that has set the entire democracy movement back.
How does your identity influence the way you go about your work?
Having an inclusive and equitable work atmosphere is important to me, and I have worked with my team and steering committee to build an environment that increasingly reflects this value. I am also excited about a project OTG is rolling out soon that will build a bridge between racial justice organizations and the accountability community — combining our efforts to build a transparent, accountable government that works for all, including communities of color. Through the initiative, OTG will expand on our expertise as a coalition builder and advocate for a multi-pronged approach to solving inequities that stem from government decision-making that often tilts against or excludes communities of color.
What's the best advice you've ever been given?
"It's always 'no' until you ask."
Create a new flavor for Ben & Jerry's.
Balance of Power — dark chocolate for judges' robes, coffee for the executive branch (it makes things run); almonds and butter pecan for protein to strengthen Congress.
What's your favorite political movie or TV show?
"House of Cards" or "The West Wing."
What's the last thing you do on your phone at night?
Log on to a workout app to try to get motivated for the next day's trip to the (home) gym. It works about half the time.
What is your deepest, darkest secret?
I lead a transparency organization and practice what I preach! I'm an open book.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.