President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for chief of staff, Reince Priebus, has vowed that White House counsel will ensure Trump avoids all conflicts of interest with his business ventures during his administration.
Last week, Trump held a meeting at Trump Tower with three Indian business partners building a Trump property south of Mumbai. His daughter Ivanka Trump, a vice president at the Trump Organization and one of the family members who will be in charge of Donald Trump’s businesses after he takes office, attended his meeting last week with the Japanese prime minister.
About 100 foreign diplomats met at the Trump International Hotel in Washington last week, and some of them viewed spending money at the president-elect’s hotel as an easy, friendly gesture, The Washington Post reported.
Jake Tapper, host of CNN’s “State of the Union,” cited these examples in an interview with Priebus on Sunday and asked: “As White House chief of staff, you’re supposed to look out for any political or ethical minefields. Is it seriously the position of the Trump transition team that this is not a huge cauldron of potential conflicts of interest?”
“Obviously we will comply with all of those laws and we will have our White House counsel review all of these things,” Priebus said. “We will have every ‘i’ dotted and every ‘t’ crossed, and I can assure the American people that there wouldn’t be any wrongdoing or any sort of undue influence over any decision-making.”
According to the Congressional Research Service, there is “no current legal requirement that would compel the President to relinquish financial interests because of a conflict of interest.”
Priebus called it a “truly unique situation” to have a president-elect with such international business interests. Trump “is now going to work toward focusing 24-7 on being president of the United States,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The Trump White House will set up a legal system to avoid conflicts of interest, Priebus said.
“All these rules are going to be followed,” he told host Chuck Todd. “There’s going to be no violation of any of these rules, I can assure you of that … As we move forward, those matters are going to be clearly spelled out, and you’re going to be aware of it.”
On CNN, Priebus addressed whether Trump would cancel all federal funding to sanctuary cities on his first day, as he had promised.
Priebus said that the administration will explore the issue and “resolve some of these major problems happening all across the country” but that federal funding is a “matter of negotiation.”
“That’s something for the new administration to decide and something that we’re going to all be working on and looking into,” he said. “But as a general matter, I totally agree … the idea that a city would decide to ignore federal law, and then want the federal government to help them anyway, is an inconsistent position for those local governments to continue to engage in. And so I think this is a matter of negotiation.”
Priebus on Sessions as attorney general
On ABC’s “This Week,” Priebus addressed the oppositions against Trump’s decision to appoint Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., as attorney general.
Several minority and civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, have sharply opposed Trump’s choice.
Priebus called such criticism “very political, very unfair” during an interview Sunday morning with Martha Raddatz.
Accusations of racism once kept Sessions from a federal judgeship. He defended himself in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1986, when President Ronald Reagan nominated him to be a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama.
“I am not the Jeff Sessions my detractors have tried to create. I am not a racist. I am not insensitive to blacks,” Sessions told the committee during his confirmation hearing, at which one witness testified that Sessions once said he had thought the Ku Klux Klan was “OK until I found out they smoked pot.” Witnesses also testified that Sessions once told a black staffer to be “careful what he said to white folks.”
Preibus said the senator shouldn’t be judged on his words from decades ago. He also called Sessions an “unbelievably honest and dignified man who started his career working against George Wallace.”
In 1966, Sessions campaigned against Lurleen Wallace, who was running for governor to keep the policies of her husband, then-Gov. George Wallace, a staunch proponent of segregation.
Still, minority and civil rights groups have raised concerns about Sessions’s upcoming role in the Trump administration.
The NAACP called Sessions’s appointment “deeply troubling.”
“Sen. Sessions has backed Trump’s call to ban Muslims from entering the United States,” Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told CNN.
Sessions also has fought legal immigration, calling it the “primary source of low-wage immigration into the United States.”
“What we need now is immigration moderation: slowing the pace of new arrivals so that wages can rise, welfare rolls can shrink and the forces of assimilation can knit us all more closely together,” Sessions argued in a 2015 Washington Post op-ed.
The Washington Post
