Trump and the Truth: His Charitable Giving

[swag]

http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/trump-and-the-truth-his-charitable-giving?utm_content=buffer02545&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

By John Cassidy

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Trump’s charitable giving has now become a campaign issue, largely due to a series of Post articles written by David Fahrenthold and his colleagues. Back in April, Fahrenthold and Rosalind S. Helderman reported that they couldn’t find a single cash donation to charity that Trump personally had made over the previous five years. The Trump campaign had provided the newspaper with a list of donations made by the candidate, but many turned out to be gifts-in-kind from Trump’s businesses, such as free rounds of golf at Trump courses donated to charity auctions, and land-conservation agreements to forgo development rights on Trump-owned properties. The only cash donations were from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, the family charity that Trump established in 1988. But the Post also pointed out that Trump hadn’t given any of his own money to the Trump Foundation since 2008—almost all of its funding came from other people, including some of his business associates.

The Post has delivered other revelations. At the end of August, Fahrenthold reported that the Trump Foundation had violated tax laws in 2013 by making a $25,000 political donation to Pam Bondi, the attorney general of Florida. At the time the donation was made, Bondi had been considering whether to launch an investigation of the scandal-plagued Trump University. Democrats accused Trump of having tried to buy off Bondi, but Bondi denied that there was any connection between the campaign donation and her decision not to pursue an investigation. Regardless, charities aren’t allowed to make political donations. Trump’s aides said the payment from the foundation was the result of an administrative error, and that the money was supposed to have come from Trump’s personal account. Earlier this year, the foundation paid a $2,500 penalty to the I.R.S.

The list goes on. Earlier this week, Fahrenthold reported that the foundation has spent more than a quarter of a million dollars to settle lawsuits filed against Trump businesses. One of the settlements, for $158,000, went to a man who had scored a hole-in-one during an event at one of Trump’s golf courses, and who claimed he had never been paid a million-dollar prize he was promised. The Post noted that using the foundation’s money in this way may have been another violation of the law: in this instance, the law that prohibits “self-dealing” by charitable organizations.

Fahrenthold and his colleagues deserve a great deal of credit for their reporting, but they aren’t the first journalists to take a skeptical look at Trump’s charitable activities. As far back as the early nineteen-nineties, the investigative reporter David Cay Johnston was following up on Trump’s claims, calling up dozens of charities that Trump said he’d given money to. Johnston had difficulty confirming some of the payments. In 1999, when Trump was mulling an earlier bid for the White House, the Smoking Gun, a Web site that specializes in unearthing and analyzing legal documents, inspected the annual tax returns of the Trump Foundation. Although Trump has managed to keep his own tax returns private, the tax filings of his foundation are public documents. They detail how much money Trump and other donors have given to the foundation, how much the foundation has handed out, and who the recipients were.

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[Thinkingabout]

1. He has abused his foundation, why he would have ever brought up the Clinton Foundation knowing

how he had abused his foundation is beyond my reasoning but then who said Trump was reasonable. He needs to be investigated on this and other matters. He is an abuser.