President-elect says he wants to avoid appearance of conflict of interest once in office, but gives little detail before planned press conference in two weeks.
Donald Trump has announced that he will be stepping away from his business interests “in total” in order to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest once he enters the White House.
The president-elect, who has been criticised by constitutional lawyers and ethics counselors for refusing to give up ownership of his business empire, said in a series of tweets on Wednesday morning that he would hold a press conference two weeks from now to discuss the plan, but provided little detail.
“I will be holding a major news conference in New York City with my children on December 15 to discuss the fact that I will be leaving my great business in total in order to fully focus on running the country in order to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” the president-elect wrote.
“While I am not mandated to do this under the law, I feel it is visually important, as president, to in no way have a conflict of interest with my various businesses.”
He added: “Hence, legal documents are being crafted which take me completely out of business operations. The presidency is a far more important task!”
The 70-year-old property tycoon is estimated to be worth billions of dollars and Trump is a recognised brand name around the world. The Trump Organization owns hotels and golf resorts and businesses including a winery and modeling agency. The holdings are unprecedented for an incoming American president.
Scores of international politicians and business partners flocked to Trump Tower in Manhattan after Trump’s election, many of the meetings raising questions about how Trump could fairly work with foreign leaders who might try and curry his favor through business.
Shortly after the vote, the president-elect met with business partners from India who are building Trump hotels in the country, although he had promised to cede control of his company to his children. Dozens of foreign diplomats visited Trump’s hotel in Washington DC after the election, the Washington Post reported.
“Why wouldn’t I stay at his hotel blocks from the White House, so I can tell the new president, ‘I love your new hotel!’ Isn’t it rude to come to his city and say, ‘I am staying at your competitor?’” an unnamed diplomat told the Post.
Trump also used a meeting with a delegation of Brexit activists including his closest British ally, Nigel Farage, to urge them to oppose wind farms he felt would spoil the view from one of his Scottish golf courses, while the Philippines government announced it was appointing his business partner in Manila as its next ambassador to Washington.
Trump told the New York Times last week that his brand “is certainly a hotter brand than it was before”, and asserted: “I know that from the standpoint, the law is totally on my side, meaning, the president can’t have a conflict of interest.”
He added: “In theory, I could run my business perfectly, and then run the country perfectly. And there’s never been a case like this where somebody’s had, like, if you look at other people of wealth, they didn’t have this kind of asset and this kind of wealth, frankly. It’s just a different thing.”
While it is true that some rules on conflict of interest for executive branch employees do not apply to the president, Trump will be bound by bribery laws, disclosure requirements and a section of the US constitution known as the “emoluments clause” that bans elected officials from taking gifts from foreign governments.
Government ethics watchdogs expressed scepticism about his latest gesture. Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said: “What he does not seem to realize, or does not want to admit, is that the conflicts arise from his ownership of the Trump Organization.
“He will continue to know what his business interests are and to benefit from them whether or not he is involved in the day-to-day management, so the conflicts remain unchanged. Unless his solution is to sell the business outside the family and put the proceeds in a blind trust, he’s not really doing anything to solve the problem. Just because you say something on Twitter, doesn’t make it so.”
Trump has previously said that he would leave his business operations to his three eldest children, Donald Jr, Eric and Ivanka, though whether he plans to continue with that idea was not clear from his tweets on Wednesday. He has sometimes described this plan as creating a “blind trust”, although experts have said that it would fall far short of a true blind trust.
Richard Painter, who served as chief ethics lawyer for President George W Bush, told the Guardian that in a true blind trust “the trustee has to be independent of the office holder and certainly not the sons and daughter”.
To further complicate matters, his children are part of his transition team executive committee. Ivanka Trump was photographed at a meeting her father held with the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe.
Asked who would run Trump’s businesses in future, Reince Priebus, his incoming White House chief of staff, said on Wednesday “that all will be worked out”.
Priebus told MSNBC’s Morning Joe that Trump had “got the best people in America working on it”. But asked whether Trump planned to put his businesses in a blind trust or leave them in his children’s hands, he said: “I’m not ready to reveal that, really.”
Trump transition spokesperson Jason Miller said: “It’s no small task to transition from a multibillionaire who’s done so many things to be president of the US. This morning’s tweets really reaffirm the commitment the president-elect has for this to be his sole focus. Already we’ve started to see the results of it.”
As evidence he cited a deal that will see air-conditioning company Carrier keep nearly 1,000 jobs at an Indiana plant as well as the appointments of Steven Mnuchin to head the treasury and Wilbur Ross, a billionaire investor and turnaround specialist, as commerce secretary.
Mnuchin, who was the national finance chairman for Trump’s election campaign, said on Wednesday the administration would overhaul trade agreements and carry out the biggest tax overhaul since the Ronald Reagan administration. Spending on roads and bridges will be a “big priority for the administration”, he added.
But like Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, Mnuchin, 53, is a former Goldman Sachs banker with no past government experience, fueling criticism that the president-elect is reverting to Wall Street insiders despite a campaign pledge to “drain the swamp”.
Dennis Kelleher, president of the campaign group Better Markets, warned: “If Mr Mnuchin and President Trump deregulate and unleash Wall Street’s biggest banks as they are suggesting, then it’s time to start the countdown clock to the next financial crash which will make the last one look mild by comparison.”
Speculation over the vacancy at secretary of state continued. Trump dined with a former rival, 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney, at a three-star Michelin restaurant housed in the Trump International Hotel near Central Park on Tuesday night. Romney, who once branded Trump a “fraud” and phony”, made an statement in support of the president-elect after the meal, which included frogs’ legs. “America’s best days are ahead of us,” he said.
Miller said Trump told him that “he thought the dinner went really well” and that there was good chemistry between the pair. Trump loyalists have expressed vehement objections to Romney. Another spokesman, Sean Spicer, said there were now four finalists for the key post.
(TheGuardian US )
