In 2013, the Donald J. Trump Association donated $25,000 to a super PAC tied to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi as her office was considering a fraud investigation into Trump University.
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When Trump’s charity made the donation, Bondi, a Republican who took office in 2011, was deciding whether to launch a formal investigation into Trump University, following complaints by Florida residents who claimed that they had been bilked.
HORSLEY: New York’s lawsuit against Trump University is still pending, along with a lawsuit filed by former students of the school.
“A news story comes out saying that the attorney general’s office is looking into this NY state lawsuit into Trump University and related entities, and a few days later, this contribution from the Trump Foundation comes in to a group supporting Attorney General Bondi”, Bookbinder said. It also flips a big narrative of the campaign: Trump has long accused Clinton of pay-to-play politics, and now he’s under scrutiny for the same.
Trump’s $25,000 donation - which his foundation failed to disclose to the IRS - came just three days after Bondi announced she was reviewing the allegations in NY.
Don’t expect Donald Trump to apologize, however.
“I never spoke to her, first of all”, said Trump, explaining his donation, according to the Post.
But those contributions came at least three years after Abbott’s office deep-sixed the investigation. “Never spoken to her about it”. But it doesn’t. The campaign contribution was illegal because it came from the Trump Foundation, a charity which is not allowed to make political contributions.
However, the Trump campaign could not elaborate on when the IRS fine was paid, when Trump and Bondi spoke, or what they talked about. The Trump Organization told the Washington Post that the donation had been made by mistake and “wasn’t done intentionally”.
As the Washington Post reported, Trump did break federal tax law by donating money from his tax-exempt charity to a political campaign and was fined $2,500 by the I.R.S., but no definitive proof has surfaced that Trump or Bondi violated federal bribery law.
Trump: “I never spoke to her” … Confronted with a contradictory statement, however, by a Bondi aide who previously said that the attorney general had personally solicited Trump for the contribution, the Trump campaign spun to reconcile the two accounts.
“The Foundation claimed on its tax returns that it engaged in no political activity and listed a different, permissible group as receiving the contribution”, CREW’s press release said. Now political reporters are paying closer attention to Donald Trump’s foundation.
No surprise: After studying 8,500 pages of documents from Bondi’s office, Orlando Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell revealed there was no evidence the AG ever took a serious look at the Trump U. complaints.
LawNewz.com has previously reported on the – shall we say convenient – timing of a donation from Donald Trump to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. “Of all of the 50 states where this was brought up, only one state pursued it, New York”, Spicer said Tuesday on CNN.
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“I think there’s actually no comparison between a man who gives consistently to Republican candidates in their re-election … and a woman who, as secretary of state, had her official staff that we pay for bartering for position and bartering for state dinners – just making contributions that are inappropriate”, she said. It’s not that there isn’t plenty of negative coverage of Trump, because of course there is, but it’s focused mostly on the insane things he says on any given day.
