“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 last four decades have met.We can’t risk the perception that government leaders would use their official positions for professional profit. Stepping back from running his business is meaningless from a conflict of interest perspective.”

Remarks of Walter M. Shaub, Jr., Director, U.S. Office of Government Ethics, as prepared for delivery at 4:00 p.m. on January 11, 2017, at the Brookings Institution:
“I wish circumstances were different and I didn’t feel the need to make public remarks today. You don’t hear about ethics when things are going well. You’ve been hearing a lot about ethics lately. I need to talk about ethics today because 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. My hope is that, if the Office of Government Ethics can provide some constructive feedback on his plan, he may choose to make adjustments that will resolve his conflicts of interest.”

• See also Will Trump Avoid a Constitutional Crisis? Ryan Lizza, January 10, 2017, The New Yorker: “…the only one for Trump to avoid a constitutional crisis, is the one that ethics experts have been advocating for months: full divestiture of his business empire and placement of the assets in a truly independent blind trust. “I have a scorecard,” Norman Eisen, one of the authors of the Brookings report and the first ethics counsel in the Obama White House, said. “At the top is a clean break.” He said Trump should follow the path of his wealthy cabinet picks, such as Rex Tillerson, the nominee for Secretary of State, who recently submitted a detailed plan to fully separate himself from ExxonMobil, where he has served as the C.E.O. since 2006.”
  
• See also via The Hill – Federal ethics chief blasts ‘meaningless’ Trump business plan
• See also WSJ – Sheri Dillon, The Lawyer Helping Trump with Conflict-of-Interest Issues
• See also WaPo – Trump says he has ‘nothing to do with Russia.’ The past 30 years show otherwise.- “The president-elect’s long history with Russia includes trying repeatedly to build luxury properties in Moscow, holding a beauty pageant there and benefiting from heavy investments from Russians in his properties around the world.
  Trump concedes Russia hacked DNC, calls salacious claims ‘fake news’
• Federal ethics chief calls Trump’s plan ‘meaningless’