During his first press conference as president-elect, Donald Trump said he will hand over control of the Trump Organization to his two eldest sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, and longtime associate Allen Weisselberg.
Advertisement
With this structure, Trump is “walking through a minefield blindfolded” when he takes office January 20, said Norman Eisen, a former top White House ethics lawyer under President Barack Obama who has led calls for Trump to divest his businesses, along with former George W. Bush lawyer Richard Painter.
The letter stems from a series of tweets the office sent from its official Twitter account in November urging President-elect Donald Trump to divest his businesses.
Because nearly any executive action could be construed as a conflict of interest, Congress in 1978 exempted the president and vice president from conflict of interest laws. “We can’t risk creating the perception that government officials will use their positions for personal profit”.
She is now an executive vice-president, but due to her husband’s role as Mr Trump’s senior adviser she will step away from the business and move with her family to Washington DC. During a news conference Wednesday, Trump’s lawyer said his holdings and investments would be put into a trust and his sons Eric and Donald Jr. would run his businesses.
“This is not a blind trust, it’s not even close”, Shaub said. “I need to talk about ethics today because the plan the President-elect has announced doesn’t meet the standards that the best of his nominees are meeting and that every President in the past four decades has met”. That’s not how a blind trust works. Lawyer Sheri Dillon, who helped write those agreements, argued that it was unrealistic to expect Trump to sell his holdings or place them in a blind trust.
On Thursday, Chaffetz published a threatening letter suggesting that he is considering an investigation into potential ethics violations, but not one having to do with the president-elect’s conflicts of interest.
The Trump Organization is believed to be bigger and more complex than the business interests of any previous chief executive, but the true value of its assets is not known.
I was especially troubled by the statement that the incoming administration is going to demand that OGE approve a diversified portfolio of assets. They say Trump didn’t have to run for president, but since he did, he should put the public’s interest ahead of his own.
According to PrivCo, which seeks to provide financial and business information on private companies, The Trump Organisation employs about 22,000 people and had revenues of $9.5 billion in 2014.
Donald Trump has said he will continue to profit from his worldwide business empire after he enters the White House – a precedent-breaking decision that has elicited fierce criticism from members of the public and ethics experts alike.
Eisen and Painter say that giving up his role as a businessman is a fair expectation for the next president.
Advertisement
Trump is “committed to ensuring that activities of the Trump Organisation are beyond reproach and can not be perceived to be exploitative of the office of the presidency”.
