The news comes as the NY attorney general is investigating whether the foundation, managed by Mr Trump and his children, broke state charity laws. The most incredibly on-brand one was that time in 2006 when he put up a 50-foot flagpole outside his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, even though Palm Beach’s city ordinance caps flagpoles at 30 feet. Trump sent a check, but it was from the Donald J. Trump Foundation – a nonprofit that for the last several years has been nearly exclusively funded by other people’s donations. Trump has claimed that donors to the Clinton Foundation were given special access to her while she served as Secretary of State.
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Should the IRS determine that Trump violated self-dealing rules, Trump could have the option to reimburse the foundation for the money he spent or he could be faced with penalty taxes.
The Post found two lawsuits against Trump businesses that he settled by tapping funds from the Trump Foundation.
Jeffrey Tenenbaum, a charity advisor at the Venable law firm in Washington, tells the Post, “I represent 700 nonprofits a year, and I’ve never encountered anything so brazen”.
The issue of “self-dealing” came up a bit last week, when we learned that Trump allegedly used foundation money to buy a giant portrait of himself, which was apparently then sent to one of Trump’s golf resorts. The lawsuit was filed after a man, Martin Greenberg, hit a hole-in-one on the 13th hole at Trump’s Westchester, New York golf course during a charity tournament, briefly winning $1 million, which was taken away after it was revealed that the shot did not travel a required 150 yards. I didn’t make a big deal out of it or hold a press conference. A draft report obtained exclusively by The Daily Caller News Foundation indicates the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) distributed “water-down” HIV/AIDS drugs to patients in Africa, increasing risks of morbidity and mortality across the continent. But we have been looking into the Trump Foundation to make sure it’s complying with the laws governing charities in NY.
Neither the Trump campaign nor the NY state attorney general’s office could be reached immediately for comment.
This is hardly the first controversy surrounding Trump’s charitable foundation, but it may be the most damaging for one straightforward reason: it doesn’t require a lot of explanation. Bondi’s office was reviewing allegations against Trump University over potential fraud and considering opening an investigation.
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