The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Trumps unscramble complex business ties
President-elect will shutter foundation to limit conflicts.
WASHINGTON — Realizing that his presidency could face potentially crippling questions over conflicts of interest, Donald Trump and his family are rushing to resolve potential controversies — like shuttering foundations and terminating development deals — even as the president-elect publicly maintains that no legal conflicts exist.
Trump anno0unced Saturday that he intends to shut down his personal charity. In recent days, he has also examined a plan to hire an outside monitor to oversee the Trump Organization and has terminated some international business projects.
“This is a process that my father and my family are taking incredibly seriously,” said Eric Trump, who will help oversee the Trump Organization, and who announced last week that he was terminating fundraising for his own charity, the Eric Trump Foundation.
Even with the proposed steps, it is unclear how much the Trump family can or will unwind its ties to its business empire. No matter what, Donald Trump will enter the White House with a maze of financial holdings unlike those of any other president in U.S. history. Many ethics experts still say the only way he can eliminate his most serious conflicts is to liquidate his company, and then put the money into a blind trust — a move the president-elect has so far rejected as impractical and unreasonable.
The potential roles that his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, may play in the administration are particularly vexatious. Both have business operations that could benefit from their government roles — even if they are not involved in the businesses on a day-to-day basis. Ivanka Trump’s business is so tied to her name that any position she might take in the White House or informal role she might play as an adviser to her father could benefit her company, which she will still own.
And because Donald Trump refuses to release his tax returns, the extent of his potential conflicts remains unknown.
“Yes, it would be hard to sell the business — there would be some personal discomfort,” said Robert Weissman, the president of Public Citizen, a liberal nonprofit group that has mocked Trump’s efforts to “drain the swamp” of Washington special interests. “But he ran for president of the United States and won, so those considerations can’t be weighted very heavily.”
The hurried effort to clean up some of the family’s potential conflicts stands in contrast to the public statements by Trump since his election that as president he would not be subject to conflict of interest laws and could eliminate most questions by turning his business operations over entirely to his children.
But in recent weeks, as public scrutiny of the president-elect’s global business operations has intensified, Trump, his family, their executives in New York and a team of outside lawyers have been working to eliminate many of these potential flashpoints — a task so complicated that Trump has delayed announcing the details.
The list of actions contemplated — with some already executed — is long, but the planned dissolving of the Donald J. Trump Foundation might be the most resonant, given the enormous controversies surrounding the nonprofit, which is under investigation by the New York attorney general.
The Trumps must work out the terms of the foundation’s closing. A spokeswoman for the New York state attorney general’s office said Saturday that any move to close the foundation required state approval, given the ongoing investigation into how it spends its money and courts donations, and the state’s order that it stop fund-raising.
“The Trump Foundation is still under investigation by this office and cannot legally dissolve until that investigation is complete,” said press secretary Amy Spitalnick.
Trump gave little thought to what to do with his business in the event of a victory on Election Day. But embarrassing reversals by his children highlighted concerns that access to the incoming administration could be for sale, and pressed the family to respond. A charity auction for coffee with Ivanka Trump, his daughter, was canceled, and Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., the president-elect’s sons, pulled out of another charity event that asked donors to give as much as $1 million in return for access to their father and a hunting expedition with the brothers.
In interviews late last week, executives at the Trump Organization, advisers on the Trump transition team and members of Donald Trump’s family said they were determined to move in the remaining days before the inauguration to clear as many of these potential conflicts as possible.
“I certainly can’t deny there is a greater desire to sort of clear the decks as much as possible to avoid distractions,” said Alan Garten, the general counsel at the Trump Organization, in an interview, pointing to the recent $25 million settlement of fraud claims against Trump’s for-profit educational program, Trump University.
While the family may be removing some of the most obvious problems, critics say Trump will still know what properties his family owns and which policy decisions will benefit them, no matter how careful he is.
The portfolio of assets might influence his interactions with leaders in nations such as Turkey and the Philippines, where Trump has prominent marketing deals. In places where he has allowed the use of his family name and even his image, the president-elect will soon be confronting foreign policy decisions, such as how to confront human rights violations or fight terrorism.
The family, at least so far, has not announced how it will resolve other issues, such as the lease at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, which was issued by the federal government’s General Services Administration, an agency Trump will soon oversee.
Trump-owned hotels and golf courses across the globe could benefit from business sent to them by foreign governments or other corporate players seeking to try to influence Trump. Loans that help finance his companies and permits issued by local government or foreign entities — even on projects that are already built — could be perceived as special favors. Payments by foreign governments to his hotels might violate the so-called emoluments clause of the Constitution, which prohibits gifts to federal employees from foreign government entities.
Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the ranking member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said he was glad to see that the Trump family appeared to have acknowledged that the conflicts issues were real. But he said much more must be done.
“He is headed in the right direction, but he has to reach the right destination, which is to divest of everything like Democratic and Republican ethics experts have said he must do,” Cummings said.