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Among the topics covered by President-elect Donald Trump at his first formal press conference on 11 January 2017 was a plan to avoid any conflict of interest between his duties as president and his role as the owner of a multi-billion-dollar business by turning the management of his companies over to his sons, Eric and Donald. To that end, Trump invited an attorney, Sherri Dillon, to the podium and gestured at a nearby table stacked high with file folders, saying, these papers are just some of the many documents that I've signed turning over complete and total control to my sons: Despite their being so prominently displayed, however, reporters were not allowed to touch or examine the documents. According to CNN: Many on social media pointed out that the displayed folders and documents appeared to be untouched, unlabeled, and, in some cases, empty. Filmmaker Amy Berg even claimed, based on her own experience, that the paper documents in some of the folders, to the extent they were visible, were blank: The Independent, a British online newspaper, made the same observation: The left-leaning BipartisanReport.com took the allegation one step further and declared the documents fake: In the end, however, all the chatter about empty files and blank or fake documents is mostly speculative. As we noted above, what gave rise to the suspicions in the first place was the fact that none of the reporters in the room was allowed to examine the file folders and documents. If no one examined them, we can't corroborate what was or was not in them. It's certainly possible that the mounds of paperwork displayed during the press conference were blank and just for show, but there is not enough evidence to prove it. On 12 January 2017, Associated Press reported making a follow-up query about the paperwork, which the Trump transition team again described as documents pertaining to the transfer of the businesses to his sons:
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