Donald Trump didn’t need another serious scandal, but he has one anyway.
One of the great ironies of the 2016 presidential campaign is that voters were led to believe that of the two major-party candidates, Hillary Clinton was the one with the controversial charitable foundation. Given the many alarming questions surrounding Donald Trump’s charitable foundation, the conventional wisdom had it backwards.
And as it turns out, it may have been vastly worse than we knew.
Last fall, Trump’s foundation took steps toward dissolution, but it ran into some trouble. The New York Attorney General’s Charities Division explained at the time that it was investigating the foundation, and the president’s entity couldn’t formally dissolve until that probe ran its course.
That was eight months ago. As an NBC News’ report makes clear, investigators have now wrapped up their examination, and they apparently found quite a bit.
The full 41-page court filing is online here (pdf). The president has already published a couple of tweets complaining about the allegations and vowing not to settle the case.
The Trump Foundation also criticized the filing, though in an amusing twist, the foundation accused of improperly being controlled by the Trump Organization responded to the allegations by issuing a statement through the Trump Organization’s email account.
If some of the allegations seem familiar, there’s a good reason for that. As regular readers know, we learned two years ago about Trump using his charitable foundation’s money to buy giant portraits of himself. He also used foundation money to make illegal campaign contributions, settle private-sector lawsuits, and support conservative political entities that could help further his partisan ambitions.
Two weeks after the Republican’s election, we learned that the Trump Foundation admitted in official documents that “it violated a legal prohibition against ‘self-dealing,’ which bars nonprofit leaders from using their charity’s money to help themselves, their businesses or their families.”
Making matters slightly worse, the president has been caught lying about all of this, arguing publicly that “ all ” of the money the foundation raised was “given to charity.” He added soon after that “ 100% ” of the millions raised went to “wonderful charities.” Neither claim was consistent with reality.
But the allegations from the New York attorney general’s office go much further, pointing, for example, to specific and documented instances in which Trump’s campaign operation coordinated the foundation’s donations for maximum political benefit to the then-candidate.
Simon Maloy’s takeaway from the court filing rings true: “This filing lays out absurd and flagrant corruption, and it makes clear not just that it was driven personally by Trump, but that he deliberately removed all safeguards and oversight that could have hindered his illegal behavior.”
It’s worth emphasizing that this is not a criminal case – New York is seeking restitution of $2.8 million, plus additional penalties – though today’s filing did refer potential crimes to the attention of the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Elections Commission.
Donald Trump didn’t need another serious scandal, but he has one anyway.
