11 Nov 2016 7:28 pm
Watchdogs question Trump’s plans to keep his empire in the family.
Short of selling his businesses, they say, he won’t be able to reassure the American people that he’s not acting in his own interests.
Never before has a billionaire with so many diverse business entanglements directly affected by White House policy taken the presidency, and the potential conflicts of interest facing Donald Trump are so unprecedented that U.S. ethics laws weren’t even written to account for them.
President-elect Trump could hold sway over regulators’ investigations into banks that have lent his businesses hundreds of millions of dollars.
He’ll be directing relations with foreign governments, such as Saudi Arabia’s, whose rulers have bought everything from real estate to a yacht from him as he struggled to pay off debts.
Watchdogs are already scoffing at Trump’s plans to turn his sprawling global empire over to his adult children – whom he also named to his transition team on Friday.
Short of selling his businesses, they say, he won’t be able to reassure the American people that he’s not acting in his own interests.
His lawyer, Michael Cohen, confirmed Thursday that Trump plans to turn the family business over to his adult children Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric through what Cohen called a “blind trust.”
“That’s not a blind trust, that’s a seeing trust,” said Norm Eisen, former ethics czar under President Barack Obama.
“This is as intricate a government ethics problem as has ever existed, and I hope he’ll be getting a bunch of experts into a room to figure out how to deal with this.”
Of course he's going to be acting in his own interests, and the right wing flying monkeys who were running around screaming about 'pay for play' in regards to the Clinton Foundation will be just fine with it.