“As president, I could run the Trump Organization, great, great company, and I could run the country,” Trump said during a Wednesday press conference .
Donald Trump’s attorney explains how the president-elect is turning over his business to a trust run by his sons, but he won’t divest. Watch Trum…
Instead, Trump will move his assets into a trust controlled by his two oldest sons, who will also manage the Trump Organization.
They will not pursue new international deals, and will hire an ethics adviser to oversee new deals in the U. S. They will also not consult with Trump on business matters.
“I hope at the end of eight years I’ll come back and say, ‘oh, you did a good job.’ Otherwise, if they do a bad job I’ll say ‘you’re fired,’” Trump said.
On Wednesday, Walter Shaub, the head of the government ethics office, called the plan “wholly inadequate.”
Walter Shaub
“The plan the [president-elect] has announced doesn’t meet the standards that the best of his nominees are meeting, and that every president in the past four decades has met,” Shaub said.
The arrangement means Trump could have dealings as president with foreign countries where he also has a financial stake. CBS News has counted at least 10 countries , including Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, where the president-elect has business interests.
“He needs to sell the businesses, free himself of conflicts of interests,” said Richard Painter, the ethics lawyer for former President George W. Bush.
Painter said Trump could violate a constitutional provision that forbids a government official from receiving payments from foreign governments. For example, a state-run Chinese bank is a tenant in Trump Tower New York.
The day Donald Trump takes office, he will be in breach of contract on his new Washington, D. C. hotel unless he cuts all financial ties to it. Tr…
“We need a clean sweep of those foreign government payments from the business empire, and there’s no evidence that that’s going to happen with respect to any of it other than the hotels,” Painter said.
Trump will also donate any profits made from foreign governments using his hotels to the U. S. Treasury. That includes his new one in Washington that leases property from the government.
Nothing Wednesday addresses the fact that as president, he will be both landlord and tenant.

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Journalists took to social media Wednesday to claim former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson lied to Congress about lobbying on Russian economic sanctions.
CNN’s Eric Bradner tweeted Tillerson “[l]ied about Exxon lobbying” to Senate lawmakers during his confirmation hearing Wednesday. Freelance writer Glenn Fleishman asked if Tillerson committed “perjury when he lied about lobbying on sanctions?”
Tillerson just denied that Exxon lobbied against sanctions
That’s false https://t.co/sATEMZeHp5 pic.twitter.com/O2IXAA83J1
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) January 11, 2017
Even members of the Senate foreign relations committee were skeptical. Chairman Sen. Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican, said “I think you called me at the time,” when Tillerson denied personally lobbying against sanctions. Though Corker did agree with Tillerson’s characterization of Exxon’s lobbying.
So, did Tillerson actually “lie” when he denied lobbying against 2014 U. S. sanctions against Russia?
Probably not and here’s why.
Tillerson, who President-elect Donald Trump nominated to be secretary of state, has been criticized for his business ties to Russia while heading Exxon. Indeed, Exxon has billions invested in Russia — as do other oil majors, like BP and France’s Total.
Exxon cut a $3.2 billion oil exploration deal with Rosneft, run by Russian oligarch Igor Sechin, in Summer 2014. Sanctions against Russia for annexing Crimea and causing unrest in Ukraine could have cost the company billions of dollars.
So, it’s not unreasonable to assume Exxon’s lobbying was against, or at least to modify, those sanctions. Tillerson, in fact, did not deny lobbying on Russian sanctions — only that the company lobbied “against” sanctions.
Tillerson told lawmakers he “never lobbied against the sanctions and that ExxonMobil never lobbied against the sanctions.”
Tillerson said Exxon’s lobbying activity surrounding sanctions legislation in Congress were informational, and more about learning “how the sanctions were going to be constructed.” Exxon did lobby the Obama administration, but Tillerson said that was to avoid putting “lives at risk and the environment at risk” by abandoning an oil rig operating in the Arctic.
“When the sanctions went into place, because of the way the sanctions were written, they took immediate effect,” Tillerson said. “There was no grace period, there was no grandfathering period, and I engaged immediately with the State Department, with the Treasury and with OFAC to explain to them there were significant risks to people and the environment if” sanctions went into effect instantaneously.
Eventually, the Obama administration granted Exxon a temporary license “so we could get all the people out of the country, get all the equipment that was subject to sanctions out of the country, including rig out of the country,” Tillerson said.
“That was really my direct engagement, was really dealing with an effect of the sanctions, so, again, the characterization ExxonMobil lobbied against the sanctions is just not accurate,” Tillerson said.
“This is hard to disprove — but very, very hard to believe,” wrote Vox’s Zack Beauchamp before admitting “while we will need more reporting to show that Tillerson lied, conclusively, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that he did.”
Politico reported Exxon sometimes used the U. S.-Russia Business Council to lobby Congress. Tillerson is a board member at the council. Exxon, however, told Politico any lobbying effort “sought and provided information” of company operations in Russia and Ukraine. Those efforts were disclosed in lobbying reports.
WSJ reporter Byron Tau tweeted “14 lobbying reports where Exxon lists lobbying on sanctions between 2006 and 2014, despite what Tillerson just said under oath.”
But Tillerson didn’t say Exxon never lobbied on sanctions, and those lobbying disclosure forms don’t say what position the company took on specific issues.
WSJ reported Monday that Exxon lobbied against sanctions — but for reasons that line up with Tillerson’s explanation to Congress.
“Mr. Tillerson and others told senior officials that because of the complexity of the Arctic project Exxon couldn’t immediately pull out without significant safety and environmental risks,” WSJ reported.
“The CEO also said U. S. sanctions applied to an existing project, unlike European sanctions, which exempted developments already under way, people familiar with the matter said.”
WSJ’s report suggests Exxon lobbied to secure their assets from sanctions. The paper sees this as lobbying “against” sanctions, but Exxon doesn’t.
Maybe asking Tillerson if Exxon opposed sanctions on Russia is the wrong question. The right question may be what exactly Exxon lobbied to change about the sanctions.
WSJ’s Tau put it another way. He said the more relevant issue is whether Exxon “lobbied to weaken sanctions or lobbied against **stronger** sanctions.”
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As Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson wraps up a day of being grilled by Senate Foreign Relations Committee, one Democratic senator on the committee said it’s “beyond [his] imagination” that Tillerson said he’d never discussed Russia policy with President-elect Donald Trump.
Russia was the center of attention Wednesday at the confirmation hearing for Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil who is Donald Trump’s pi…
“He said that in his one meeting or his two meetings with the President-elect, he didn’t even discuss Russia — which is beyond my imagination,” Sen. Robert Menendez (D-New Jersey) told CBSN’s Elaine Quijano in an interview for the daily politics show “Red and Blue.” “And so these are all parts of elements that are going to be concerning as we have to decide in Mr. Tillerson’s nomination.”
By far the strongest objection politicians on both sides of the aisle have to Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil, is his perceived closeness with Russia and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Tillerson and Putin met in the 1990s when Tillerson was working on Exxon projects in Russia; the pair continued to have such a good working relationship that Tillerson was awarded the Russian Order of Friendship in 2013.
Sen. Marco Rubio grills Rex Tillerson about Russian President Vladimir Putin. Tillerson says he would not call Putin a war criminal; and Rubio re…
Those ties to Russia were a big part of the questions Tillerson got from Senate members in Wednesday’s hearing — including Menendez.
Asked whether he was concerned about Tillerson’s response on the issue of Russian sanctions, Menendez replied: “I’m worried about his views on sanctions in general.”
“We just introduced a bipartisan package of extending sanctions on Russia — he wouldn’t express himself on that,” Menendez said. “He says he didn’t even know that Exxon was lobbying against sanctions against Russia and Iran, and yet I produced lobby reportings that showed than Exxon had.”
Rex Tillerson delivers opening statements at his confirmation hearing for secretary of state.
Menendez continued, saying he was encouraged to hear that Tillerson — unlike, at times, Mr. Trump — said he believes the U. S. should stand by its NATO commitments. Still, he added, it doesn’t mean much unless Mr. Trump agrees with Tillerson on the issue.
“Listen, if that is the President-elect’s position then I am happy to hear it, that’s one item that I am happy to hear,” he said. “I think that provision of NATO is the linchpin of our relationship throughout Europe, the linchpin of the alliance and critically necessary.”
Ultimately, Menendez said, he worried that Tillerson didn’t have a good enough grasp of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy views to be a credible emissary for Mr. Trump abroad.
“In terms of his conversations with the President-elect — I don’t know how he’s going to get to speak for him unless he knows what positions and views he has,” Menendez said.
Menendez also had some criticism for Mr. Trump, who said during his press conference in New York today that he considers Putin’s praise of him to be “an asset, not a liability.”
Secretary of state nominee Rex Tillerson answers questions from Senator Marco Rubio about cybercrime retaliation.
“Putin is KGB — that’s where he cames from, he believes in the greater Russia,” he said, referring to the former Soviet security agency. “Unless you understand that, and you understand that Putin only understands strength as a response to what he does, then admiration is not going to win the day … right now I think [Trump] is treating Putin in the wrong way.”
Tillerson’s confirmation hearing was not the only high-profile hearing happening on Capitol Hill on Wednesday: it was also day two of the confirmation hearings for Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama), Mr. Trump’s pick for attorney general.
Senator James Inhofe, R-Okla., addresses the Conservative Political Action Committee, February 10, 2012 in Washington, D. C.
Asked about the highly unusual move by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N. J.) to testify against Sessions, one of his fellow senators, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) said Booker was putting his 2020 presidential ambitions ahead of his duties to choose the right man for the job.
“Cory Booker’s running for president and he wants to get out there in front,” he told Quijano, also for the CBSN show “Red and Blue.” “… There’s no one who is better qualified, no one who is more compassionate than Jeff Sessions.”
Inhofe, who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee, praised Mr. Trump’s defense secretary pick, Ret. Gen. James Mattis — and said he believes Congress should waive the requirement that Mattis be out of government for seven years before serving
He cited Gen. George C. Marshall, who served as President Truman’s secretary of state and secretary of defense after WWII, as another example of a retired general who ultimately was excused from the seven-year rule for good reason.
“Mattis is one of the most qualified, the toughest guys out there,” he said, saying Mattis is the “right person in the right job at the right time.”

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