Conflict of interest not illegal if Trump does it.

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The Orange One is saying that he can run his business and the government and it is not illegal to have a conflict of interest.
WASHINGTON ― President-elect Donald Trump told The New York Times Tuesday that laws around conflicts of interest don’t apply to him, and he can simply keep running his businesses from the White House.

“In theory I could run my business perfectly and then run the country perfectly,” Trump said, according to tweets from New York Times reporters interviewing the president-elect Tuesday. “There’s never been a case like this.”

He is technically correct on both counts.

Federal conflict of interest laws do not apply to the president of the United States, and the obvious conflicts of interest created from his ownership of a global real estate empire are unprecedented in the nation’s history. Just because the federal laws mandating other federal officials to place their assets into a true blind trust run by an independent trustee do not apply to the president, does not mean that Trump’s conflicts of interest are not real.

Trump seems to think otherwise: “The law’s totally on my side, the president can’t have a conflict of interest.”

To take Trump seriously, and not literally, as his defenders like to do, he is saying: If the president does it, it’s not illegal.

The comments come just hours after Trump tweeted Monday night that people knew about his glaring conflicts of interest when they voted for him. It is therefore supposedly the media’s fault for reporting on them.

Trump’s global real estate empire presents the potential for massive conflicts of interest or their appearance as every U.S. government policy action could be directed or seen to be directed to benefit the president’s pocketbook. The United States government is supposed to act in the public interest of the people and not in support of one individual’s private benefit.

The list of the president-elect’s conflict of interest problems has grown over the two weeks since he won election.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/don ... r1away8pvi
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

Re: Conflict of interest not illegal if Trump does it.

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This could be the shot in the arm that print media was waiting for, a new age of investigative journalism. There are plenty of young reporters itching for stories to investigate. The media has to pass around story leads to other papers like they did chapters of the Pentagon papers, steps ahead of Trump and his lawyers. They'll need to have a major Twitter presence to combat Trump & Co. Trump sits in his castle feeling snug that he knows how to play all the media games - the media games have to change.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Conflict of interest not illegal if Trump does it.

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Conflict of Interest might not apply, but the Foreign Emoluments Clause of the Constitution might.
The Foreign Emoluments Clause in Article I, section 9, provides that “no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States] shall, without the Consent of Congress, accept of [sic] any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
Some of the key questions are as follows:

1. Whether a corporation created by a foreign state ought to be treated as the foreign state for these purposes. The founders wouldn’t have been contemplating such an arrangement, but the answer, if the Clause is going to have any effect, ought to be yes.

2. Is an apparently arms-length business deal, with value going in both directions, between an entity connected to the president and an enterprise controlled by a foreign state potentially covered by the Clause? In such a case no “present” seems to be involved, unless the terms aren’t in fact arms-length. But, even so, the term “emoluments” picks up some arms-length arrangements, at a minimum including compensation for services provided to the foreign government. (An American official’s being paid for actual services is clearly more problematic than getting a “present” from the government.)

3. If the president’s business enterprise strikes a deal with a corporation formed by a foreign government not directly involving provision of services, is it clear that no “emolument” is involved? It’s not clear to me.

4. Does it matter that the Trump kids, rather than President Trump himself, will be running the Trump enterprises? In that case, maybe the emolument, if any, is going to the kids rather than to Dad. But surely the purpose underlying the Foreign Emoluments Clause is implicated. What are called “blind trusts” are often like the “blind” beggars in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. With the Trump family in charge, I don’t see how anyone can even pretend blindness.
Whether or not one concludes that Trump’s business dealings violate the letter or the spirit of the Emoluments Clause, the underlying controversy is almost certainly non-justiciable. It is difficult to conceive of a scenario in which someone would have standing to challenge Trump’s arrangements, and even harder to think what sort of remedy could be ordered by a court. In other words, if there are concerns about how President Trump handles his various investments, the only remedies will be political.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Conflict of interest not illegal if Trump does it.

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laragc wrote:Seriously think we all might have underestimated Pence's long game.
Yes, I think there are multiple senarios in which Pence could be president and that ranges anywhere from 1-8 years.

If Trumps plays nice with the Republicans, then I think he can do all sorts of illegal dealings with no penalty. If he's frustrating the Republicans and doing all sorts of illegal dealings, he's good as gone.

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