Ben Carson

During his confirmation hearing Thursday, Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee alternated between cordial exchanges with Housing and Urban Development nominee Ben Carson and pressing him hard on potential conflicts of interest between HUD and a president with major real estate holdings and lax ethics.

Carson and Democrats from the right, like Indiana’s Joe Donnelly, and the left, like Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren, shared concerns about childhood lead poisoning, with the Democrats citing specific dangers in their home states and Carson—the pediatric neurosurgeon—affirming that children should not be exposed to lead. But there were fewer warm fuzzies when Warren asked Carson to “assure us that not one dollar will go to benefit either the president-elect or his family.”

"If there happens to be an extraordinarily good program that's working for millions of people and it turns out that someone that you're targeting is going to gain, you know, $10 from it, am I going to say 'No'?" Carson asked. "Logic and common sense probably would be the best way."

As Warren pointed out in response, when we are talking about HUD programs we are not talking about $10 gains. But Carson wasn’t just refusing on principle to assure her that the Trumps won’t benefit:

"The reason you can't assure us of that is because the president-elect is hiding his family's business interests from you, from me, from the rest of America," Warren said.

Later in the hearing, Sherrod Brown (D-OH) returned to the question of how Carson would handle a Trump-owned property—and there is at least one government-subsidized Trump property, Brown noted—ultimately getting Carson to agree to at least let the Senate committee know if he would be having dealings with that or any other Trump-owned property. The problem being, as Warren pointed out, we don’t know where all of Donald Trump’s business interests are. In that sense, the hearing served as a reminder that Trump’s conflicts of interest aren’t his alone. They extend throughout the government, and his fake ethics plan won’t fix that.