Politics & Power Quote by Karen Hughes

The sentence performs a Washington magic trick: it turns an obvious workaround into a compliance story. Hughes doesn’t defend the ethics rules; she uses them as stage props. “The lawyers advised” shifts agency away from her, laundering a choice through professional authority. It’s passive-voice accountability: don’t look at the motive, look at the memo.

The real pivot is “proper way.” That word is doing heavy labor, recoding a strategic arrangement as procedural virtue. Consulting for the Republican National Committee while “continue[ing] to advise the President” sounds less like leaving government than changing the payroll code. The subtext is blunt: the work stayed the same, the formal relationship changed to fit the rules. Ethics becomes a box to check, not a boundary to respect.

Context matters. Hughes was a high-level communications figure in the Bush orbit, steeped in the era’s tight fusion between the White House and party apparatus. The quote captures that ecosystem’s logic: politics doesn’t stop at the edge of official service; it just reroutes through “outside” channels that keep influence intact and disclosure murky. “For the year after I left” frames the arrangement as temporary and reasonable, a finite bridge rather than a revolving door with a welcome mat.

It works rhetorically because it offers an alibi that sounds adult and institutional. If lawyers said it was fine, then the ethical discomfort becomes your misunderstanding of how Washington operates. The line isn’t just self-exculpation; it’s a quiet assertion that power can remain continuous even when titles change.