Families Desperate For Word On Missing Loved Ones In TN Wildfires; Trump To Leave His Business "In Total" To Focus On Presidency.
CUOMO: President-elect Donald Trump actually tweeting about something that matters this morning, his future in business. He said in a series of posts that he's going to hold a major news conference on December 15th with his children to discuss leaving his business "in total to focus on running the country." Trump says he will have, in no way, a conflict of interest. How will he do that? Let's discuss with David Rennie, the Washington bureau chief for "The Economist". His latest article focuses on Trump's business dealings. It's good to have you with us, David. Part of the discussion has been answered for us. Trump is now addressing this, saying he's going to come out and hopefully be somewhat transparent in how he's going to achieve this. Let's start with the basic idea. Why is this important, Trump dealing with apparent conflicts?</s>DAVID RENNIE, WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF, THE ECONOMIST: Well, I mean, he's an unusually rich man. He also has a very complicated, unusually opaque business empire. Very few kind of public accounts that you can read and make sense of what he owns. He has a lot of overseas assets and overseas investments and ventures, often involving powerful businessmen linked to foreign governments. That is clearly a recipe for a massive conflict of interest. I think what we say in "The Economist" this week is that there's two unrealistic positions being put forward. One is Donald Trump's assertion that the law doesn't really cover presidents and conflicts of interests, and if he hands off his businesses to his children then that makes him arm's length and independent. We think that's not right because his children have no essential separate business identity from his own that he adds to his empire and they've always just worked for him. But the other unrealistic call is for him to sell everything before he becomes --</s>CUOMO: Right.</s>RENNIE: -- president. We make the point that it takes a least a year to prepare an IPO for a well-run and transparent public company -- private company. He doesn't have a year.</s>CUOMO: Right.</s>RENNIE: And, essentially, if you were to give -- if you were going to liquidate everything you'd be talking about a fire sale of his good assets --</s>CUOMO: Right. RENNIE -- leaving him with a bunch of draws (ph).</s>CUOMO: And a lot of it's licensing deals and without Trump's name and full faith of him behind it, what's it worth? And the idea of a blind trust is also easy to say, hard to do because, again, these aren't shares in some company that he could just put into a blind trust, especially with his kids running it. So we have two different types of concern here. What's going to happen with the ongoing business interests that they already have and how will he do business as president in a way that may be a concern? You point out the example of the King of Bahrain, the event for him taking place a month before Trump is set to take office. And you make an interesting allusion to an aspect of the constitution that many people won't know anything about -- Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8. It's the restriction on emoluments. This weird arcane word that meant in the Articles of Confederation about profiting from office, an old Latin word. What does it mean in today's reality?</s>RENNIE: So, that's not actually in our article, but you're right. There is this emoluments clause and public officials are not allowed to benefit from, essentially, gifts with a political purpose. It's also about the optics. It's astonishingly bad for governments like Bahrain to think when they come to America, we've got this. We know how this works. This works as it does in, say, the Arab world or in Uzbekistan. You book a big event in the hotel owned by the president or the family of the president. That happens in other countries. Other countries think they understand that that's how the world works. It's not how it's meant to work in American and it's really serious. There are serious, sensible, practical things that Donald Trump could do to make this go away. You saw a blind trust is very hard. You're absolutely right, but he could consolidate all of his businesses under one roof. He could have consolidated accounts. He could publish those. Independent board of directors. An independent CEO is vital. He should promise not to make any new foreign investments and, essentially, turn his business empire into a kind of mature portfolio of domestic property businesses which provide the family with money through rental income. If he did that a lot of these problems would go away.</s>CUOMO: All right. So, obviously, you're right. It's not the economists, it's political, and people should look there for their reporting on why they have these concerns about people coming to his events or paying for spaces that are his once he's President of the United States. Now, two more issues. One is should we be able to see the legal documents that he's talking about? Of course, it's a private company but do you think as President of the United States there will be an ethical requirement on him to let there be scrutiny of these documents? And two, what about his kids? If his kids are able to sit in on meetings with government officials from other countries, isn't that an inherent conflict?</s>RENNIE: Absolutely, and that's why we say that if he's going to keep these business assets, and we think he should be allowed to, he has to hand them over to an independent board of directors. His saying his kids will be arm's length just doesn't cut it. You're absolutely right. It doesn't cut it because for one thing we've already seen his daughter and son-in-law in a meeting with the prime minister of Japan. That's just not a clean way to separate your business, personal, and government business. But it's also -- his kids just aren't realistically independent business figures. They are his kids. They've always been attached to him umbilically in business terms. It's a kind of -- it's a fake to say that they can run an independent business.</s>CUOMO: What about seeing the documents? Obviously, transparency has been something that he has rejected violently to this point. Do you think these documents are something that need to be scrutinized to be believed?</s>RENNIE: Absolutely, and beyond that. We need to see consolidated accounts for his businesses. We don't know even how much his businesses are already worth. We don't know who he owes money to. He hasn't published his tax returns. He has to understand that when he says confidently during the campaign that his supporters don't care about this stuff, that may have been dismayingly true during the campaign. But he's now president and his whole world has changed, and we don't yet see evidence that he's fully brought that on board.</s>CUOMO: One of the things that he's saying in his own defense is the law does not require this. He's being a little cute with that, isn't he, David? There is no law specifically on this, but there's lots of precedent for what the ethical requirements are that would show that running a business at the same time that you're president would be completely and wholly unacceptable.</s>RENNIE: It is true that the law is silent on the president and vice president when it comes to the kind of conflict of interest that might catch a lower official. But here's our appeal to Donald Trump and we put it on leader this week. Does he really want his presidency to be consumed by this stuff? Does he really want his entire kind of plan for making America great again to be sidetracked by endless accusations and conflicts of interest? Endless perceptions that he's up to no good. This could drown his presidency in bad publicity, investigations, and noise. He doesn't need to do this. There are perfectly sensible things he could do to make this go away. To give it to an independent board of directors. We're not asking him to bankrupt himself or sell his assets off cheap. He just needs to do something sensible which nods to the fact that the public deserves a transparent president who's not just obeying the law, but is seen to obey to kind of spirit of the law.</s>CUOMO: And yet, it's still -- it's a unique situation where the value of the business is so closely tied to the value of his name and that brand. David Rennie, thank you very much for the reporting this morning. Appreciate it. We have a lot of news this morning. There are wildfires burning that we have to tell you about. They've turned deadly. Let's get to it.</s>MITT ROMNEY (R), FORMER GOV. OF MASSACHUSETTS: I've been impressed by what I've seen.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's going to make a tremendous difference as our next president.</s>DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT-ELECT: We'll see what happens.</s>SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D), NEW YORK: We say to our Republicans who want to privatize Medicare, go try it. Make our day.</s>REP. TOM PRICE (R), HHS SECRETARY NOMINEE: I believe that the president's health care law violates every single principle we hold dear.</s>CAMEROTA: The president-elect touting a deal to save 1,000 manufacturing jobs in Indiana.</s>GOV. MIKE PENCE (R-IN), VICE PRESIDENTIAL-ELECT: It's going to be a busy day. Stay tuned.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is crazy.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The city on fire.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We've had a difficult 24 hours.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There was flames everywhere. It was a firestorm.</s>ANNOUNCER: This is NEW DAY with Chris Cuomo and Alisyn Camerota.</s>CUOMO: Good morning. Welcome to your NEW DAY. It is Wednesday, November 30th, 8:00 in the east. Donald Trump's economic team taking shape. We now know his pick for Treasury secretary. It will be Wall Street veteran, Steve Mnuchin.