Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:10 pm
The media has consistently focused on conspiracies surrounding Hillary Clinton, whether it’s about her emails, her foundation or, more recently, her health. While they continue to pursue the big, nonexistent Clinton scandal, they have been missing in action when it comes to reporting on something that is much more newsworthy and scandalous: the Trump Foundation.
While unfounded accusations fly about the Clintons using their foundation to enrich themselves, there is actual proof that Donald Trump has done just that through his own “charitable” organization.
On Saturday, Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold wrote a story documenting how the Republican nominee “retooled his charity to spend other people’s money.”
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According to Fahrenthold’s reporting:
The Donald J. Trump Foundation is not like other charities. An investigation of the foundation — including examinations of 17 years of tax filings and interviews with more than 200 individuals or groups listed as donors or beneficiaries — found that it collects and spends money in a very unusual manner.
For one thing, nearly all of its money comes from people other than Trump. In tax records, the last gift from Trump was in 2008. Since then, all of the donations have been other people’s money — an arrangement that experts say is almost unheard of for a family foundation.
Trump then takes that money and generally does with it as he pleases. In many cases, he passes it on to other charities, which often are under the impression that it is Trump’s own money.
In two cases, he has used money from his charity to buy himself a gift. In one of those cases — not previously reported — Trump spent $20,000 of money earmarked for charitable purposes to buy a six-foot-tall painting of himself.
Money from the Trump Foundation has also been used for political purposes, which is against the law. The Washington Post reported this month that Trump paid a penalty this year to the Internal Revenue Service for a 2013 donation in which the foundation gave $25,000 to a campaign group affiliated with Florida Attorney General Pamela Bondi (R).
The Post added that Trump’s foundation “appears to have repeatedly broken IRS rules.”
Compared to anything reported about the Clinton Foundation, this is actually pretty damning. It’s puzzling, then, why the coverage of this story is almost nonexistent when the media has spent hour after hour covering a whole lot of nothing about the foundation affiliated with the Democratic nominee.
But Trump’s foundation woes don’t end with that singular piece of reporting.
Another story out today, also reported in the Washington Post, explained that there are “five phantom donations in the files of Donald Trump’s foundation.”
The report:
Five times, the Trump Foundation’s tax filings described giving a specific amount of money to a specific charity — in some cases, even including the recipient’s address. But when The Post called, the charities listed said the tax filings appeared wrong. They’d never received anything from Trump or his foundation.
The Post asked Trump’s staff to explain these five apparent errors.
It has explained one.
Regarding that one (No. 5 on the list below), the Trump organization’s explanation showed something very unusual. The incorrect gift had been listed on the Trump Foundation’s tax filings in a way that served to hide a real gift — the improper donation to Bondi’s group — from the IRS. Trump’s staffers say there was no intent to mislead: The improper gift was left off, and the false gift was added, by accident.
It’s still unclear how the four other apparent errors arose.
As Mark Sumner wrote on Monday, this should be a “campaign-ending scandal” for Trump. Unfortunately, most Americans have probably heard nothing about it.
There is enough airtime in the 24/7 news cycle to be covering this story in a real way, but the media is inexplicably asleep at the wheel.
It’s time for that to change. If it doesn’t, the media is doing a grave disservice to voters.
Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
