The Washington Post revealed on Tuesday that the cases involved a combined $258,000 paid out by the Donald J. Trump Foundation – a charity nearly entirely funded with other people’s money, the newspaper said – and follows a review of legal documents and the foundation’s tax records.
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Although campaign officials did not specifically say what the Post got wrong, it argued that its reporting was biased and looked to distract away from questions facing Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton over her own family’s charitable foundation. It is the Clinton Foundation that is set up to make sure the Clintons personally enrich themselves by selling access and trading political favours.
Legal experts said the Trump Foundation’s donations in connection with litigation involving Donald Trump’s personal businesses may have violated tax regulations that prohibit using nonprofit charities for private interests. In 2001 he claimed that his roast on Comedy Central raised $1 million for charity, but Trump Foundation documents reveal report just one donation in the amount of $400,000 from the network.
“Yes, Trump pledged as part of the settlement to make a payment to a charity, and yes, the foundation is writing a check to a charity”. A $158,000 donation subsequently was made by the Trump Foundation. And you can’t have charitable foundation paying off Trump’s personal obligations.
Obviously, there are some ethical questions this raises, but Trump might have broken US tax law as well. The Post found that Trump also bought a portrait of himself for $10,000 at a 2014 charity fundraiser, for a total of $30,000 in charitable funds spent on portraits of himself.
Since 2009, Trump’s Charity money has come from other donors while Trump remains the foundation’s president and still gives nothing to an important cause through his charity.
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida faced $120,000 in unpaid fines from the town of Palm Beach stemming from a dispute over the size of a flagpole.
This, in fact, is not borne out by other records explored in Fahrenthold’s reporting: Trump has not given a dime to the Foundation in almost a decade. Palm Beach agreed to waive the fines if Mar-a-Lago made a $100,000 donation to a veterans’ charity.
But David Fahrenthold, who wrote the Post article, told CNN that “Trump is using his charities to benefit his businesses, which is against the law”.
Read the full report in The Washington Post. Trump made no donations to his foundation from 2009 to 2014, which is the a year ago records are available.
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The New York Attorney General is currentlAt the time, Bondi was considering joining a fraud lawsuit against Trump University, but decided against it after Trump donated to her campaign.
