Donald Trump and his children have for years promoted themselves and their real estate opportunities in Russia and other former Soviet states, and ethics experts say if he is elected President the get-tough U.S. sanctions against Russia could be in direct conflict with his business interests.

Trump has said he will not participate in decisions about his business if he is elected to the White House and that those decisions will be left to his children in what they have called a “blind trust.”

But Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor who served as ethics advisor to Republican President George W. Bush, said the arrangement would not fit his definition of a blind trust, and appeared ripe for potential conflicts.





“I don’t see how you have a blind trust when you know what’s in the blind trust,” Painter told ABC News. “The appearance is that a foreign government or other foreign organization has influence over the president of the United States through financial dealings with his family and that would be unacceptable.”

As questions have been raised about Trump’s business interests with Russians, the candidate has sought to distance himself from Moscow.

“For the record, I have ZERO investments in Russia,” he wrote on Twitter in July.

He later told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, “Will I sell condos to Russians on occasion? Probably. I mean I do that. I have a lot of condos. I do that. But I have no relationship to Russia whatsoever."

But an ABC News investigation found he has numerous connections to Russian interests both in the U.S. and abroad.

“The level of business amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars -- what he received as a result of interaction with Russian businessmen,” said Sergei Millian, who heads a U.S.-Russia business group and who says he once helped market Trump’s U.S. condos in Russia and the former Soviet states. “They were happy to invest with him, and they were happy to work with Donald Trump. And they were happy to associate—[and] be associated with Donald Trump.”

Questions about Trump’s posture towards Russia have been a recurring issue in the 2016 presidential campaign. They have come from Democrats and Republicans, many of whom expressed surprise at Trump’s flattering remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, even as the official U.S. stance has grown increasingly frosty.

“I would treat Vladimir Putin firmly, but there’s nothing I can think of that I’d rather do than have Russia friendly as opposed to the way they are right now so that we can go and knock out ISIS together with other people and with other countries,” he said.







Sen. John McCain told a talk radio audience he was “astonished” after Trump praised Putin on the campaign trail. “I think [it] shows either profound ignorance or an attitude that contradicts everything about the United States of America and our relations with our adversaries,” McCain said.





The Russian Boom With Trump Branded Properties

Long before he ran for president, Trump displayed an ongoing interest in Russia and the former Soviet states. He negotiated projects in the Republic of Georgia and Azerbaijan, neither of which was completed. And he and his children at different times toured Moscow in search of a site for a Trump project there.

“I know there were some drafts prepared for the [Moscow real estate] project when Donald Trump flew to Moscow. And he shared those drafts with some of the Russian businessmen,” Millian said, adding, “It didn't go any further at the moment.”

Trump was involved in a range of deals with Russian-born business executives, including the developer of the Trump project in Toronto. One of his partners in Trump Soho recruited financing from investors in Russia and Kazakhstan, according to court filings. And in 2013, Trump earned a cut of the proceeds when a Russian oligarch paid to host the Miss Universe Pageant at his venue in Moscow.







At the same time, wealthy Russians accounted for significant profits at Trump projects in the U.S.. Throughout the 2000s, records show Russians were buying into Trump branded real estate.

ABC News conducted a review of hundreds of pages of property records and found that Trump-branded developments catered to large numbers of Russian buyers.

This was most notable at the Trump licensed condo towers in Hollywood and Sunny Isles, Florida. Local real estate agents credited the Russian migration for turning the coastal Miami community into what they called “Little Moscow.”

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