“It's kind of unrealistic to say, you're going to take the business away from the three people who are running it, and give it to some independent person," Rudy Giuliani said. | Getty Giuliani: No reason to put Trump's children 'out of work'

President-elect Donald Trump is “in a very unusual situation” when it comes to his considerable assets, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said Sunday, because putting control of his businesses into a true blind trust “would basically put his children out of work.”

Trump has previously said that he would cede control of the Trump Organization to his three eldest children, Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., if he were elected president. But such an arrangement would do little to assuage concerns regarding a conflict of interest and would leave him open to speculation that decisions he makes in the White House were made not to benefit the country but his own financial situation.


The Manhattan billionaire and his surrogates have previously said that leaving control of the family business to the three children would constitute a “blind trust,” even though that situation would not meet the legal definition of a true blind trust. Giuliani noted in his Sunday morning interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” that the president is not required by law to use a blind trust and that allowing the three children, all of whom are executive vice presidents of the Trump Organization, to run the company would be acceptable.

“It would seem to me that if he set up a situation in which the children were running it, there was a legal or clear document that meant that he would not be involved, he would have no interest in it, he would have no input into it, he would just have a passive interest, that would be the kind of thing that would work here,” the close Trump adviser said.

“It's kind of unrealistic to say, you're going to take the business away from the three people who are running it, and give it to some independent person.”

Giuliani said, “There's no perfect way to” insulate Trump from the business he has spent decades running and added that “there will have to be a wall between” him and his children, should they end up in charge of the family business while their father is president.

“So, I think you're going to have to fashion something that is very comfortable, something that's fair, something that assures the American people, as he said, he has no interest in what's going on in the business, and that his children get to run the business they know how to run,” Giuliani said.