“Prior to the election it was well known that I have interests in properties all over the world,” Donald Trump tweeted defensively on Monday, amid a flood of stories about the president-elect’s ongoing involvement in his sprawling business empire and his countless conflicts of interest in dozens of foreign countries. “Only the crooked media makes this a big deal!” On Tuesday, Trump continued to defend his management of the Trump Organization, as well as his decision to hand control of his business to his adult children—an arrangement that he has likened to a “blind trust,” but that will allow him to know exactly what assets he controls and unfettered communication with its leadership. In an on-the-record meeting with The New York Times, Trump told the paper that, legally speaking, there is nothing preventing him from managing his business and the country at the same time. Even more worrying, Trump is, technically speaking, right.

“In theory I could run my business perfectly and then run the country perfectly. There's never been a case like this,” Trump argued during the hour-long sit-down. “I’d assumed that you’d have to set up some type of trust or whatever and you don’t,” he added. Indeed, according to U.S. law, the president, unlike other federal employees, is exempt from having to divest from businesses and financial interests while in office. Ethics laws don’t apply to the commander in chief, who has traditionally been restrained only by long-standing norms. Only the Emoluments Clause, an until-recently obscure provision of the Constitution, prevents the president from accepting any “present, emolument, office or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince or foreign state,” unless agreed to by Congress.

Already, Trump is testing the boundaries of such laws. Last week, Trump took a meeting with three Indian businessmen who had worked with the president-elect on a Trump-branded property in Mumbai and were reportedly hoping to continue their working relationship once Trump was in office. He allowed his daughter Ivanka Trump to sit in on his first diplomatic exchange with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe. And The Washington Post reported both that Trump registered eight new companies in Saudi Arabia while campaigning last year and that foreign diplomats are already booking rooms at the newly opened Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C., as a way to curry favor with the incoming administration.

Trump, who has refused to release his tax returns to the public, brushed aside those questions about conflicts of interest. “The law’s totally on my side, the president can't have a conflict of interest,” he told the Times on Tuesday, though he described his company’s financial well-being as immaterial compared to the honor of the presidency. “My company's so unimportant to me relative to what I'm doing,” Trump said, though he noted happily that his Trump D.C. hotel had become a “hotter” brand since he won the election, making it “probably a more valuable asset than it was before.”

Still, Trump seemed to admit to mixing business and politics in the past weeks. The president-elect acknowledged that while meeting with U.K. politician Nigel Farage, he had brought up the construction of an offshore wind farm in Scotland that he has long sought to block, arguing that it obstructed the views from his golf course near Aberdeen. According to one person who attended the meeting, Trump suggested that Farage and his associates should start “campaigning against wind farms in England, Scotland, and Wales.”

As for Trump’s children, who are members of his White House transition team and are in the process of taking over his company, the billionaire said he saw no problem in letting them run the Trump Organization while advising him in his capacity as president. “If it were up to some people,” he said, “I would never, ever see my daughter Ivanka again.” That said, he seemed open to suggestions about how to separate himself from his business, so long as he didn’t have to sell his real-estate holdings (a difficult task, he argued). “I’d assumed that you'd have to set up some type of trust or whatever and you don't,” he said. But, “I would like to do something.”