Donald Trump didn’t need another serious scandal, but he has one anyway.<\/b>
\nOne 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\u2019s 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\u2019s foundation took steps toward dissolution, but it ran into some trouble. The New York Attorney General\u2019s Charities Division explained at the time that it was investigating the foundation, and the president\u2019s entity couldn\u2019t formally dissolve until that probe ran its course.
That was eight months ago. As an NBC News\u2019 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\u2019s email account.
If some of the allegations seem familiar, there\u2019s a good reason for that. As regular readers know, we learned two years ago about Trump using his charitable foundation\u2019s 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\u2019s election, we learned that the Trump Foundation admitted in official documents that \u201cit violated a legal prohibition against \u2018self-dealing,\u2019 which bars nonprofit leaders from using their charity\u2019s money to help themselves, their businesses or their families.\u201d
Making matters slightly worse, the president has been caught lying about all of this, arguing publicly that \u201c all \u201d of the money the foundation raised was \u201cgiven to charity.\u201d He added soon after that \u201c 100% \u201d of the millions raised went to \u201cwonderful charities.\u201d Neither claim was consistent with reality.
But the allegations from the New York attorney general\u2019s office go much further, pointing, for example, to specific and documented instances in which Trump\u2019s campaign operation coordinated the foundation\u2019s donations for maximum political benefit to the then-candidate.
Simon Maloy\u2019s takeaway from the court filing rings true: \u201cThis 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.\u201d
It\u2019s worth emphasizing that this is not a criminal case \u2013 New York is seeking restitution of $2.8 million, plus additional penalties \u2013 though today\u2019s filing did refer potential crimes to the attention of the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Elections Commission.
Donald Trump didn\u2019t need another serious scandal, but he has one anyway.<\/p>\n

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