After postponing for weeks a planned press conference to announce how he would avoid conflicts of interest as president, Donald Trump on Wednesday finally addressed the media. Or, at least his tax lawyer did. After only a handful of questions from reporters, Trump summoned Sheri Dillon to the stage to read a statement explaining his plan to comply with ethical standards. “He directed me to design a structure for his business empire that would completely isolate him from the management of the company,” she said, arguing that the new structure would ensure that Trump could not be exploiting his new office.

Ethics watchdogs and legal experts were not impressed by the plan, which will leave Trump fully invested in his global, multi-billion dollar business empire. As expected, Dillon confirmed that the president-elect will hand over management of the Trump Organization to his two adult sons, Eric and Donald Jr. She said that his business had cancelled all pending foreign deals, and will not make any more during his term, though it will continue to make deals domestically, as approved by an ethics adviser, who went unnamed.

The idea that Trump and his sons will be forbidden from discussing the family business—a directive seemingly impossible to enforce—is “meaningless,” Office of Government Ethics director Walter Shaub said in a blistering response Wednesday. Speaking at the Brookings Institution immediately after Trump’s press conference, Shaub, colloquially known as the “ethics czar,” blasted the “half-blind trust” as “not even close” to a true blind trust, which would have involved Trump completely divesting from his companies and handing control to an independent trustee. “It’s not even halfway blind. The only thing it has in common with a blind trust is the label: trust.”

Trump himself has repeatedly argued that no laws compel him to separate himself from his business. “I could actually run my business and run government at the same time,” he said Wednesday, noting that ethics laws do not apply to the president. “I don’t like the way that looks, but I would be able to do that if I wanted to.” Dillon made the same point in her presentation, saying “President-elect Trump should not be expected to destroy the company he built.” She argued that the Emoluments Clause—a portion of the U.S. Constitution that prohibits the president from accepting gifts, presents, and financial backing from foreign governments—does not apply to “fair-value exchanges” such as foreign government officials paying to stay at Trump hotels. Many ethics experts and legal scholars have suggested that receiving business income from foreign government sources would place Trump in violation of the Constitution on his first day in office, and serve as grounds for impeachment. Dillon suggested Trump would avoid any such conflict by donating all foreign-government payments to his hotels to the U.S. Treasury, “so that the American people will benefit.”

Professional ethicists were not won over by the attempt to spin Trump’s foreign income as a potential boon for taxpayers. “If he doesn’t divest, he’s going to be violating the Constitution,” Norman Eisen, a former White House ethics adviser to Barack Obama, told Time bluntly. Harvard Law professor Larry Tribe was similarly concerned. “The whole phony setup would make President Trump a living, walking, talking, tweeting violation of the Emoluments Clause each time banks or funds linked to foreign sovereigns are allowed to take steps that Trump will necessarily know are enriching the total value of his family’s mega-business,” he told LawNewz, shortly after he took to Twitter to denounce the entire arrangement a ”Potemkin village of a trust at best.”