Click on the video to activate live chat.
The Trump Foundation has committed verifiable illegal deeds and goes virtually uncovered. The media have been covering the Clinton Foundation for some time because of the optics of a sitting Secretary of State or a potential president collecting money from charitable donors.
Trump Foundation story about to hit mainstream media?
The mainstream media may finally start covering the Trump Foundation as a conduit for distributing other people’s money to charity for unknown reasons. The video clip in the post referenced an article in the Washington Post (WaPo) written by David A. Fahrenthold titled “How Donald Trump retooled his charity to spend other people’s money” that is a must-read for voters, bloggers, and journalists alike.
The WaPo article comes with a detailed analysis of the charities record. It contacted virtually all of its donors and documents its findings.
There are some disturbing results of that research. Just like Trump University was a fraudulent enterprise that provided no real benefits for its ‘students,’ the Trump Foundation seem to exhibit similar behavior for the goodwill 0f personal, charitable giving.
According to WaPo,
Trump had found a way to give away somebody else’s money and claim the credit for himself.
WaPo explains one of the most blatant cases as follows.
Trump had earlier gone to a charity in New Jersey — the Charles Evans Foundation, named for a deceased businessman — and asked for a donation. Trump said he was raising money for the Palm Beach Police Foundation. The Evans Foundation said yes. In 2009 and 2010, it gave a total of $150,000 to the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a small charity that the Republican presidential nominee founded in 1987.
Then, Trump’s foundation turned around and made donations to the police group in South Florida. In those years, the Trump Foundation’s gifts totaled $150,000. Trump had effectively turned the Evans Foundation’s gifts into his own gifts, without adding any money of his own.
On the night that he won the Palm Tree Award for his philanthropy, Trump may have actually made money. The gala was held at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, and the police foundation paid to rent the room. It’s unclear how much was paid in 2010, but the police foundation reported in its tax filings that it rented Mar-a-Lago in 2014 for $276,463.
Trump and his Trump Foundation was fined recently for donating $25,000 to Florida’s Attorney General Pamela Bondi. The Attorney General was contemplating joining a lawsuit against the fraudulent Trump University. After the donation, the Pamela Bondi decided not to to be party to the suit.
But it gets much deeper. WaPo reports it as follows.
At the same time that it began to rely on other people’s money, the Trump Foundation sometimes appeared to flout IRS rules by purchasing things that seemed to benefit only Trump.
In 2007, for instance, Trump and his wife, Melania, attended a benefit for a children’s charity held at Mar-a-Lago. The night’s entertainment was Michael Israel, who bills himself as “the original speed painter.” His frenetic act involved painting giant portraits in five to seven minutes — then auctioning off the art he’d just created.
He painted Trump. … Melania Trump increased her bid to $20,000. “I understand it went to one of his golf courses,” Israel said of the painting. The Trump Foundation paid the $20,000, according to the charity that held the benefit. Something similar happened in 2012, when Trump himself won an auction for a football helmet autographed by football player Tim Tebow, then a quarterback with the Denver Broncos.
The winning bid was $12,000. As The Post reported in July, the Trump Foundation paid. IRS rules generally prohibit acts of “self-dealing,” in which a charity’s leaders use the nonprofit group’s money to buy things for themselves. In both years, IRS forms asked whether the foundation had broken those rules: Had it “furnish[ed] goods, services or facilities” to Trump or another of its officers? In both years, the Trump Foundation checked “no.”
Read the WaPo article and the research behind it. Then make sure we cover this and all the other ignored fraudulent deeds of our Republican candidate Donald Trump. There is not much time left for us to do the job of our presumably Liberal media.
Viewers are encouraged to subscribe and join the conversation for more insightful commentary and to support progressive messages. Together, we can populate the internet with progressive messages that represent the true aspirations of most Americans.
