ABC News(NEW YORK) — Rudy Giuliani, vice chair of Donald Trump’s transition team, is advising the president-elect to put his businesses in a blind trust ahead of taking office “for the good of the country.”
“For the good of the country, and the fact you don’t want a question coming up every time there’s a decision made, he should basically take himself out of it, and just be a passive participant in the sense that he has no decision-making, no involvement,” Giuliani said on ABC’s This Week. “And those decisions get made separate from him, which is the way it’s done for most cabinet offices.”
Giuliani’s remarks came as many observers note that Trump’s business empire — comprised of more than 500 companies around the globe, including more than 250 bearing his name — make him potentially susceptible to significant conflicts of interest.
Trump has said previously that, if elected, he would turn his businesses over to his children, Ivanka, Don Jr., and Eric, who would not be part of his administration. But after he named his children to his transition team this week, there is renewed concern about potential conflicts between the interests of the Trump business empire and the incoming president’s obligations to put the country first.
Giuliani also dismissed talk that he could be named as the next secretary of state, telling ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that any discussions about him serving in Trump’s administration are “between him and me.”
“I have a very, very full life. So it would have to be something where I felt he really needed me and — not that I’d be the only one that could do it, but maybe that I could do it a little bit different or a little bit better than somebody else,” Giuliani said when asked about his possibly having a role in the administration.
Giuliani disagreed with Democrat Hillary Clinton’s blaming her loss on FBI Director James Comey’s sending a letter to Congress 11 days before the election that announced a review of newly-found emails tied to her server.
The former New York City mayor argued instead that the Affordable Care Act was the primary reason Trump won.
“Being part of the campaign, we put up front in all of Donald Trump’s speeches for the last two or three weeks not the FBI, but Obamacare,” he said. “The blue states we were able to turn red and basically haven’t been red since Ronald Reagan — I think Obamacare was the bigger hit.”
Giuliani also commented on the anti-Trump protests that have broken out in cities around the nation every night since the Nov. 8 election.
He said all of the tens of thousands who have been out in the streets demonstrating against the president-elect are “professional protesters.”
“They didn’t look to me like people who were, you know, carefully studying political science and were all upset about the ideology of the election,” Giuliani said.
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