US President-elect Donald Trump’s eldest daughter, Ivanka, has denied that she will serve in her father’s White House administration.
In a family interview Sunday night with CBS’s 60 Minutes, the 35-year-old business woman and mother of three said she would not hold a formal administrative capacity in her father’s cabinet.
“I’m going to be a daughter,” she said. “I’ve said throughout the campaign that I am very passionate about certain issues. And that I want to fight for them.”
Among the issues she said she would support are wage equality, childcare, education and women’s rights.
Ivanka converted to Orthodox Judaism before marrying her husband Jered Kushner in 2009. The couple, along with her two eldest brothers are part of a group of loyalists and advisors that form their father’s transition team laying the groundwork for him to take office on January 20, 2017.
Ivanka and brothers Eric and Donald Jr. along with Kushner accounted for a fourth of the 16-member executive committee, which was filled with politicians and advisers who stuck with Trump during his roller-coaster first run for public office. Kusher held a pivotal role as advisor to Trump during the campaign on issues including Israel.
When asked during the interview whether they sought positions in their father’s administration, the other Trump children veered the conversation toward his real estate empire.
However, the president-elect’s third child, Eric, reaffirmed that he along with the eldest two of his siblings would run the day-to-day operations of their billionaire father’s company while he serves as commander in chief.
“We’ll be in New York and we’ll take care of the business. I think we’re going to have a lot of fun doing it,” he stated.
Experts in government ethics said that giving over control to Trump’s children would do virtually nothing to prevent potential conflicts of interest, since there’s usually no daylight between one’s personal interest and the interest of one’s immediate family members.
Federal conflict-of-interest law does not apply to the president, but most White House occupants in the last few decades have voluntarily placed their assets in a blind trust to avoid any suggestion of impropriety.
Typically, a blind trust involves turning over assets to an independent financial manager with no prior relationship to the owner. In addition, a blind trust derives its name from the idea that the owner would no longer know what assets are sold or bought. For instance, someone with extensive stock holdings would have no way of knowing which companies’ shares he or she still owned in a blind trust.
Trump’s portfolio includes interests in hundreds of limited liability companies, many overseas, as well as numerous real estate properties both domestic and foreign.
Short of selling the entire Trump empire, experts said, he will find it difficult to create a trust sufficiently “blind” to avoid the possibility of any conflicts.
