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For some time now, the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold has been looking into the neglected subject of Donald Trump’s charitable giving.
And most recently he’s found out that Trump’s charitable foundation made an illegal campaign contribution to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (this reporting is based, in turn, in part on work done by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington). Then when they found out they had broken the law, they kinda sorta corrected the error but didn’t actually follow their legal obligation to get the money back.
It’s all at least a little suspicious. The story includes the phrase: "Trump staffers said that a series of unusual — and unrelated — errors by people working for Trump had led to both the improper donation and to the omission of that donation from the foundation's tax filings."
What’s more, the contribution to Bondi came right when she was one of several attorneys general who were looking into possible Trump University fraud investigations. Shortly after receiving the illegal campaign contribution she dropped the investigation.
Oh, also, it turns out that the Trump Foundation itself was part of a setup to ensure that Trump’s own money was never used to finance a Trump charitable contribution.
In the grand scheme of the 2016 campaign this seems like maybe not that big of a deal.
But it’s hard not to notice the fact that various Clinton Foundation lacuna involving such scandalous activity as trying to help a Nobel Peace Prize winner, introducing the chair of the Kennedy Center at the Kennedy Center Honors dinner, and having a meeting with the Crown Prince of Bahrain have been major, cycle-dominating news stories. I think it’s fair to say that a lot more digital pixels have been spent exploring possible conflicts of interest involving Clinton charities than the contents of Clinton’s plan for combatting drug addiction.
Meanwhile, the various lies and fake donations that Fahrenthold has been investigating have gotten essentially zero bounce anywhere.