Dell has a long-standing partnership with Microsoft and is a major buyer of Microsoft Windows PC licenses.<\/p>\n
The company\u2019s founder, Michael Dell, has appeared at White House events during Trump\u2019s second term and sits on the President\u2019s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. Dell\u2019s family foundation pledged more than US$6b last year to help fund \u201cTrump accounts,\u201d which will seed investments for 25 million American children.<\/p>\n
Greg Williams, director of the Centre for Defence Information at the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, said: \u201cThis absolutely does ring alarm bells with regard to conflicts of interest\u201d.<\/p>\n
The Trump Organisation said this month that the President\u2019s investment holdings were managed exclusively by independent third-party financial institutions.<\/p>\n
Presidents are exempt from a conflict-of-interest law that prohibits federal employees from taking action in their official roles that would benefit their personal finances. There is also no legal requirement requiring a sitting president to give up a financial benefit because of a potential conflict.<\/p>\n
Margaret Dylus-Yukins, senior legal counsel for ethics at the Campaign Legal Centre and a former Office of Government Ethics lawyer, said that – although the ethics rules did not apply to the president or vice president – \u201cthe ethics norm has been for presidents to historically avoid even the appearance of self-enrichment\u201d.<\/p>\n
She added: \u201cThe fact that President Trump promoted a company owned by his friend that he also invests in does, indeed, create an appearance of a conflict of interest, though it does not constitute an actual ethics violation under the current rules.\u201d<\/p>\n
Williams said the Government should \u201crevisit the arrangement whereby we rely on the President\u2019s own sense of integrity rather than law to avoid conflicts of interest\u201d.<\/p>\n
Such a move would require an act of Congress.<\/p>\n
Independent watchdog groups have long charged that Trump, in his second term, has used his office for his personal gain and that of his family.<\/p>\n
Since his election, the Trump family has profited from Trump-themed cryptocurrency and signed overseas deals in countries that have reason to cosy up to the United States and its leader.<\/p>\n
More recently, Trump agreed to drop a lawsuit against the IRS – which he oversees – as part of an agreement that established a nearly US$1.8b Justice Department fund to compensate those who, like him, claim they have been targets of a \u201cweaponised\u201d justice system under the Biden administration. <\/p>\n
Along with the Dell stock purchases, Trump\u2019s latest financial disclosure, released this month, revealed tens of millions of dollars in other trades. The form showed, for example, that Trump bought stock in leading companies such as Microsoft and Amazon months before the Pentagon announced deals to deploy their technology in classified computer networks.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s assets are held in a trust managed by his children. That differs from previous presidents\u2019 blind trusts, which were not managed by family members and were designed to prevent their owners from knowing how their investments were being handled.<\/p>\n
For his part, the President has criticised congressional Democrats for years for making stock trades that he says were based on insider information. At his State of the Union address in February, Trump called for the passage of a bipartisan bill to ban congressional stock trading, but the measure has stalled.<\/p>\n
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor\u2019s Picks<\/a>, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week\u2019s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dell has a long-standing partnership with Microsoft and is a major buyer of Microsoft Windows PC licenses. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":450343,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[229269,74,64865,696,1558,8613,138,3391,1656,1566,3468,19934,229268,2178,25965,811,71,3014,266,19196,111,139,69,1523,19903,46930,36200,2572,17146,106955,23742,781,7809,370,1361,122685,2179,229270,63725,102],"class_list":["post-450342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-97b","tag-after","tag-alarm","tag-announced","tag-been","tag-billion","tag-business","tag-buys","tag-company","tag-contract","tag-deal","tag-dell","tag-dells","tag-donald","tag-ethics","tag-financially","tag-from","tag-gain","tag-government","tag-granted","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-over","tag-pentagon","tag-pointing","tag-potentially","tag-president","tag-questions","tag-sounding","tag-stands","tag-stock","tag-suggest","tag-tech","tag-that","tag-transactions","tag-trump","tag-us97","tag-watchdogs","tag-with"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=450342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450342\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/450343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=450342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=450342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=450342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}