The
Trump Foundation: what's known is shocking. We need to know more
Jill Abramson
Wednesday 21
September 2016 18.40 BST
Revelations that
Donald Trump’s so-called charity helped him settle legal disputes
are extraordinary, and would sink Clinton. This is vital reporting
Imagine if Hillary
Clinton had a 6ft portrait of herself painted for a charity auction.
Then Bill bid it up and paid for it with $20,000 from the Clinton
Foundation. And the Clinton Foundation donated $100,000 to the ACLU
or Naral.
Then imagine that
she spent $258,000 from the foundation to cover expenses arising from
legal challenges.
And here’s the
really beautiful bit: imagine that the Clinton Foundation has no
discernible purpose as a charity.
If the Clinton
Foundation had done all of these things, Hillary (and perhaps Bill
and Chelsea too) might well be headed to prison, the place Donald
Trump and his supporters insist she belongs.
There is a clear
disparity in the attention focused on Clinton’s supposed ethics
problems and Trump’s
But it’s the Trump
Foundation, not the Clinton Foundation, which reportedly bought a
portrait of its namesake, settled legal claims for him, donated money
to a rightwing advocacy group and whose purpose is somewhat opaque.
I know about the
Trump Foundation’s ersatz charity mostly from the work of one
dogged investigative reporter from the Washington Post, David
Fahrenthold, who bothered to contact more than 300 charities to see
whether they’d received donations from the Trump Foundation. His
reporting unfolded as so many other journalists were writing their
50th stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails. It is only in the past
week that the Post’s reporting on the Trump Foundation has gained
traction. The issue should come up in the first presidential debate
Monday, as those “damn emails”, as Sanders called the
over-covered controversy over Clinton’s private email server,
surely will. (The Trump campaign, by the way, has claimed that the
report is “peppered with inaccuracies and omissions”.)
There is a clear
disparity in the attention focused on Clinton’s supposed ethics
problems compared with Trump’s. There has been some excellent
reporting on everything from Trump University to his business
practices, especially the tax breaks he received on real estate deals
uncovered by the New York Times. But these revelations seem to roll
off Trump’s back, while in the Clintons’ case they create
indelible stains.
I have covered the
nexus of money and politics since 1988. My investigations revealed
the twisting of the tax code governing charities by GOP political
figures and different Democratic fundraising abuses in Bill Clinton’s
presidential campaign. When it comes to the cesspool of political
money, I’ve been an equal-opportunity scrutinizer.
I also practically
know by heart the tax code governing charitable groups – section
501C(3) – and immediately recognize that some of the Trump
Foundation’s donations involve unusual interpretations of it, to
say the least.
For example, when
Melania Trump used a Trump Foundation check to purchase the towering
(forgive the pun) portrait of her husband, the painting wasn’t
donated to a charity but apparently hung in the boardroom of one of
her husband’s golf clubs. The more than a quarter of a million
dollars of Trump Foundation funds that went to help settle legal
disputes included a case involving the height of a flagpole at
Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s estate in Palm Beach, Florida. And the
conservative activist group that received $100,000 from the Trump
Foundation was Citizens United, the group that opposes the disclosure
and limitations of political fundraising and is headed by David
Bossie, who was recently hired as Trump’s deputy campaign manager.
Perhaps the most
salient thing about the foundation that bears his name is that Donald
Trump himself has given a relatively small amount of money to the
Trump Foundation and none since 2009, although we won’t know for
sure until – don’t hold your breath – Trump releases his tax
returns. Although there are some legitimate gifts to real charities,
it’s unclear what the Foundation actually does.
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Except for deep
explorations by the New Yorker editor David Remnick, the Times’ Amy
Chozick and Celia Duggar, and a recent book by Joe Conason,
relatively few journalists have looked seriously at the good works of
the Clinton Foundation, especially on global health and the
environment. The Foundation has given many millions to drive down the
cost of anti-retroviral drugs to treat Aids in Africa and Latin
America. It helped establish a multi-city fund for better technology
to combat global warming and other environmental problems. The list
of its projects could fill its own book. When I was managing editor
of the Times, Bill Clinton invited a group of us from the paper to
his office in Harlem for a barbecue lunch (this was before his heart
problems and vegan diet) and spent more than three hours talking to
us about the foundation’s work.
A separate and much
smaller Clinton Family Foundation handles their personal
contributions to charities. According to their tax returns, the
Clintons as a couple have donated about 10% of Bill and Hillary’s
multimillion-dollar incomes in recent years to various well-known
charities, more than most super-wealthy people, who give an average
of about 3%.
Though his
vice-presidential running mate, Mike Pence, has said that Trump
personally contributes “tens of millions of dollars” to
charities, as with so much about Donald Trump, absolutely nothing has
been made public to back up the claim. We are just supposed to accept
Pence’s word and the statement in a recent CNN interview by his
campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, who calls reporters’ questions
about his charitable foundation “badgering”, that Trump is indeed
“a very generous man”.
Personally generous
he may sometimes be. The work of the Trump Foundation, however, is an
entirely different question. For journalists, for regulators, for any
citizen who cares about the future of this country, this isn’t
badgering. It’s an urgent democratic duty.
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