63C Am.Jur.2d, #PublicOfficers and Employees, §247 “As expressed otherwise, the powers delegated to a public officer are held in trust for the people and are to be exercised in behalf of the government or of all citizens who may need the intervention of the officer. [1] Furthermore, the view has been expressed that all public officers, within whatever branch and whatever level of government, and whatever be their private vocations, are #trustees of the people, and accordingly labor under every disability and prohibition imposed by law upon trustees relative to the making of personal financial gain from a discharge of their trusts. [2] That is, a public officer occupies a #fiduciary relationship to the political entity on whose behalf he or she serves. [3] and owes a fiduciary duty to the public. [4] It has been said that the fiduciary responsibilities of a public officer cannot be less than those of a private individual. [5] Furthermore, it has been stated that any enterprise undertaken by the public official who tends to weaken public confidence and undermine the sense of security for individual rights is against public policy. Fraud in its elementary #commonlaw sense of deceit-and this is one of the meanings that fraud bears [483 U.S. 372] in the statute. See #UnitedStates v. Dial, 757 F.2d 163, 168 (7th Cir1985) includes the deliberate concealment of material information in a setting of fiduciary obligation. A public official is a fiduciary toward the public, including, in the case of a judge, the litigants who appear before him and if he deliberately conceals material information from them, he is guilty of fraud. McNally v United States 483 U.S. 350 (1987)

Posted by MalikaDulce at 2020-12-11 20:35:54 UTC