ABC News investigative report:

Donald Trump and his children have for years promoted themselves and their real estate opportunities in Russia and other former Soviet states, and ethics experts say if he is elected President the get-tough U.S. sanctions against Russia could be in direct conflict with his business interests.

Trump has said he will not participate in decisions about his business if he is elected to the White House and that those decisions will be left to his children in what they have called a “blind trust.”

But Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor who served as ethics advisor to Republican President George W. Bush, said the arrangement would not fit his definition of a blind trust, and appeared ripe for potential conflicts.

“I don’t see how you have a blind trust when you know what’s in the blind trust,” Painter told ABC News. “The appearance is that a foreign government or other foreign organization has influence over the president of the United States through financial dealings with his family and that would be unacceptable.”…

He later told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, “Will I sell condos to Russians on occasion? Probably. I mean I do that. I have a lot of condos. I do that. But I have no relationship to Russia whatsoever.”

But an ABC News investigation found he has numerous connections to Russian interests both in the U.S. and abroad.

“The level of business amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars — what he received as a result of interaction with Russian businessmen,” said Sergei Millian, who heads a U.S.-Russia business group and who says he once helped market Trump’s U.S. condos in Russia and the former Soviet states. “They were happy to invest with him, and they were happy to work with Donald Trump. And they were happy to associate—[and] be associated with Donald Trump.”