The Trump Foundation: what's known is shocking. We need to know more
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.
But it’s the Trump Foundation, not the Clinton Foundation, which reportedlybought 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”.)
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