President-elect Trump’s sprawling business empire has presented an unprecedented set of ethical challenges to the lawyers who are working to insulate his administration from potential conflicts of interest, and who are being closely watched by Trump’s political opponents.
Critics are already sounding the alarm over Trump’s continued involvement in the business he spent four decades building. His aides have given no indication that the president-elect has recused himself from the Trump Organization, though he won’t have an obligation to do so until he’s sworn in on Jan. 20.
But at the same time, Trump is indicating that he may not be able to leave the company completely, and that legally, he may not have to. Trump gave several hints Tuesday at a meeting with the New York Times that the situation may not be as clean cut as his detractors think, and suggested there might be room for him to stay attached somehow to the Trump Organization.
“I’d assumed that you’d have to set up some type of trust or whatever and you don’t,” Trump said, according to reporters who tweeted out his remarks.
“The law’s totally on my side, the president can’t have a conflict of interest,” he said, in a reference to current law, which exempts the president from key conflict of interest rules.
With those comments, Trump seemed to be opening the door to keeping some level of involvement in his company, although exactly how it may shake out remains unclear. Trump himself acknowledged it’s a unique set of circumstances.
“In theory I could run my business perfectly and then run the country perfectly,” he said. “There’s never been a case like this.”
In the meantime, government watchdogs argue that Trump should at least remove his children from the transition process if he plans to leave them in control of his company next year.
“So long as those who meet with his kids … believe that that news can reach the president, I think there’s no way to decouple the business aspects from the political,” said Lisa Gilbert, director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division.
Gilbert said excluding his three eldest children from transition decisions would be a “symbolic” move given their dual roles running the Trump Organization and advising their father.
“That said, it’s his family, so he can’t kick them out of his life, and so he will hear about the business operations so long as they are the ones running it,” she said. “So the best thing to do is to have them not engaged.”
A “true blind trust” is the only way to mitigate the panoply of conflicts presented by the multi-billion dollar Trump business, Gilbert noted. “A real blind trust would have to be managed by a third party, not one of his children,” she said.
Trump acknowledged the scrutiny building over his proposed solution to the problem during his New York Times meeting. “If it were up to some people, I would never, ever see my daughter Ivanka again,” Trump joked.
Because many of Trump’s assets are real estate holdings and not easily-offloaded stocks or securities, it would be difficult for the president-elect to liquidate his interests in the short time remaining before he enters the White House. That leaves Trump with fewer options to navigate the sea of possible conflicts than previous businessmen-turned-politicians.
On the final foreign trip of his presidency, Obama suggested Trump follow his example by investing his money into treasury bills, which the president did upon taking office. “We made a decision to liquidate assets that might raise questions about how it would influence policy,” Obama said.
The size and nature of the Trump Organization makes such traditional tactics less feasible, the president-elect suggested on Tuesday. With luxury properties in cities from Rio De Janeiro to Dubai, his business holdings could carry implications for both domestic and foreign policy.
Democrats have already seized on Trump’s financial ties to suggest his administration could breed corruption.
Reports this week of foreign diplomats who have stayed at the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C. since the election in order to curry favor with the president-elect have raised fresh questions about whether Trump stands to profit personally from the luxury property, which sits on the same street as the White House.
The questions are even more significant in the context of his campaign crusade against Hillary Clinton’s conflicts of interest, which plagued her tenure at the State Department thanks to the work of her family’s foundation.
And although there are no laws on the books that require the president to separate himself from business interests, the “Emoluments Clause” of the Constitution prevents a president from profiting off foreign governments.
Jason Miller, a spokesman for the transition team, said Tuesday on a conference call with reporters that a plan for the transfer of power at the Trump Organization would be made public “as soon as the lawyers have worked through that.”
