Trump lied about that whole thing
Trump said he would transfer his companies to a family trust by the 20th. Of course he lied. He hasn’t done it. It wouldn’t be nearly good enough if he had, but he hasn’t even done it. That thing he said he was going to do. Pro Publica looked into it.
To transfer ownership of his biggest companies, Trump has to file a long list of documents in Florida, Delaware and New York. We asked officials in each of those states whether they have received the paperwork. As of 3:15 p.m. today, the officials said they have not.
Trump and his associates “are not doing what they said they would do,” said Richard Painter, the chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush. “And even that was completely inadequate.”
ProPublica’s questions to the transition team were referred to an outside public relations firm, Hiltzik Strategies, which declined to comment. The president’s team did not allow reporters to view documents, which they said were legal records separating Trump from his eponymous business empire. Dillon’s law firm, Morgan Lewis, has not released the records and they declined further comment, saying it doesn’t comment on client issues.
None of that is ok. They shouldn’t be using a PR firm for this. The PR firm shouldn’t be refusing to comment. They shouldn’t be hiding what’s in the “documents” (which is probably nothing). Trump’s lawyer’s firm should not be stonewalling.
ProPublica looked at more than a dozen of Trump’s largest companies, which are registered or incorporated in three states. Officials in New York and Delaware said documents are logged as soon as they are received. In Florida, officials told us there is typically a day or two before documents are logged into the system.
Here is what we found:
- Business filings for Trump Organization LLC, Trump’s primary holding company, had not been changed, according to New York’s Department of State. Wollman Rink Operations LLC, which runs the Wollman Rink in Central Park through an agreement with New York City, hasn’t been updated either. Trump is listed as the sole authorized representative of the company.
Donald has said more than once that, since he is president, he isn’t subject to ethics violations. I think he misunderstands that in a big way. The fact that he doesn’t have to put his assets in a blind trust doesn’t mean he can do anything he wants without it violating ethics rules…if only someone (on his side, because on our side we’ve tried) would explain it to him, in one syllable words.
It’s hard to figure out where to apply Hanlon’s Razor with Trump, when there is so much evidence of so much stupidity and malice. It’s possible that he just does not understand what a conflict of interest is – or rather, that it is a bad thing: he’s been happy to try to hire the lawyers of people suing him for lucrative positions, presumably to undercut their case. That every identifiable bit of payment reaching his company from anyone represents a bribe to the POTUS – and that it is neither business as usual nor “being smart” – may be something he’ll require those single syllable words from some trusted source to explain. He could be that slow. But it’s entirely reasonable that he’s simply unable to think that very bad, unethical, illegal things are not to his credit when he’s the one doing them and he’s the President.
And if his tame partisans in Congress will go along and his cultists will cheer him on – if he can get away with it, take the money and run – well then, supposed ethics rules really don’t have any force over him.
Mind you, when malice comes from a simple inability to understand that right and wrong have some applicable meaning other than the satisfaction of your own whims, it becomes a specialized sort of stupidity.
Sure. It is possible to be ignorant and a bad person at the same time. It’s possible that Trump may represent a particularly toxic combination of those qualities.