ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Just before Donald Trump took office the first time, he held a press conference, announcing that he would turn over control of his business empire to his sons. He said he wanted to address concerns about conflicts of interest even though he maintained he didn't really have to.
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DONALD TRUMP: So I could actually run my business. I could actually run my business and run government at the same time. I don't like the way that looks, but I would be able to do that if I wanted to. I'd be...
SHAPIRO: This time around, Trump has a whole new set of business interests, from social media to crypto, and he has not announced any plan to divest from them. Noah Bookbinder is the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a group that sued Trump over his business interests in his first term. Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
NOAH BOOKBINDER: Good to be here.
SHAPIRO: So to go back to the 2017 press conference, Trump announced he was transferring the Trump Organization's businesses to a trust and turning over what he called complete and total control.
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TRUMP: What I'm going to be doing is my two sons, who are right here - Don and Eric are going to be running the company.
SHAPIRO: He also adopted an ethics plan to stop new international deals and said he would donate any profits the Trump businesses made from foreign governments to the U.S. Treasury. You sued him anyway. Why?
BOOKBINDER: Well, those efforts were never really serious attempts to avoid conflicts of interest. Donald Trump maintained effective ownership interest of all of his companies. So when they made money, he made money. He knew what those interests were, so he knew that he would make money if those companies profited. There was never really an effort to separate himself.
Beyond that, the Constitution actually says that no one who is a federal government official can receive things of value from foreign governments unless Congress authorizes it. It also says that the president can't get paid by the federal government or state governments beyond his or her salary. So we felt it was really important to vindicate the Constitution - or at least try the best we could to do that - both because you shouldn't be able to violate the Constitution, but also because we want the president making decisions based on what's in the interest of the American people, not what makes him money.
SHAPIRO: The case that you brought was eventually declared moot by the Supreme Court because, by that point, Trump had left the White House. Since then, his businesses have evolved a lot. What concern does the present-day portfolio present?
BOOKBINDER: We think there's even more possibility for conflicts of interest now. You still have the possibility for the kinds of things that we saw in the first Trump administration, where foreign governments or companies or industries stayed at rooms in his hotel, held events at his resorts. But now you have other types of businesses. You have this giant social media company, Trump Media, which is the parent company for Truth Social. And if - whether it's a foreign government or a company or a wealthy investor wants to essentially give money to Donald Trump, it can buy a whole lot of stock in this publicly traded company. And when somebody buys a lot of stock, it often drives the stock value up. That is the primary source of Donald Trump's wealth at this point. So if you move that value up, you're essentially putting money in his pocket.
SHAPIRO: So just to nail this down, the scenario is, I want to get in with President Trump. I buy $10 million worth of Truth Social stock, and then I sidle up to him at a party of Mar-a-Lago and say, hey, your stock price increased 'cause I dumped a bunch of money into it. Like, is that what you're concerned about?
BOOKBINDER: Precisely. And Donald Trump, the first time around, made clear he was perfectly fine with companies or people or countries showing their respect for him by bringing business his way. And now the scale potentially got a whole lot bigger.
SHAPIRO: We've described how he responded to these concerns last time. How has he responded this time?
BOOKBINDER: As of now, we've heard nothing. Donald Trump has not indicated that he is planning to divest his businesses. There was a story in the fall where Eric Trump essentially said, we tried so hard to be ethical last time, and nobody gave us credit for that. He didn't say what that means, but the implication may be we're not even going to try this time.
SHAPIRO: Donald Trump and his spokespeople have called your organization, CREW, a radical, left-wing activist group. They argued that he actually lost money as president compared to what he could have earned if he had hung onto all of his business interests and not gone to the White House. What do you say to that?
BOOKBINDER: Well, I say, first of all, that we're an organization that has gone after Democrats and Republicans when they have run afoul of ethics rules of the laws of this country. But beyond that, the key here is to have a country that is run in the interest of the American people. And Donald Trump, again and again, through his first term as president, showed that he was willing to use the presidency to benefit his businesses - that he was willing to run roughshod over traditions, rules, laws, even the Constitution. We're always going to call that out.
SHAPIRO: Noah Bookbinder is president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Thank you.
BOOKBINDER: Thanks so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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