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| No my flagpole is much bigger than this. |
Donald Trump spent more than a quarter-million dollars from his charitable foundation to settle lawsuits that involved the billionaire’s for-profit businesses, according to interviews and a review of legal documents.
Those cases, which together used $258,000 from Trump’s charity, were among four newly documented expenditures in which Trump may have violated laws against “self-dealing” — which prohibit nonprofit leaders from using charity money to benefit themselves or their businesses.
In one case, from 2007, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club faced $120,000 in unpaid fines from the town of Palm Beach, Fla., resulting from a dispute over the height of a flagpole.
In a settlement, Palm Beach agreed to waive those fines — if Trump’s club made a $100,000 donation to a specific charity for veterans. Instead, Trump sent a check from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a charity funded almost entirely by other people’s money, according to tax records.
Anybody surprised that Donald Trump was in a dispute over the "length of his flagpole?"
Yeah me neither.
Trump also used Foundation money to settle a lawsuit concerning one of his golf courses, to purchase advertising for his hotels, and also he used $10,000 to buy a portrait of himself.
How "charitable" of him.
All of this is of course completely illegal and if this were a regular guy he would be facing jail time.
Here is how one expert on charities responded to the news:
“I represent 700 nonprofits a year, and I’ve never encountered anything so brazen,” said Jeffrey Tenenbaum, who advises charities at the Venable law firm in Washington. After The Washington Post described the details of these Trump Foundation gifts, Tenenbaum described them as “really shocking.”
“If he’s using other people’s money — run through his foundation — to satisfy his personal obligations, then that’s about as blatant an example of self-dealing [as] I’ve seen in awhile,” Tenenbaum said.
So is this it? Is this the scandal that finally destroys the Donald Trump candidacy?
Or is this just one more scandal to add to the long list of scandals that have failed to stop this seemingly Teflon coated thug?
Sadly I think we already know the answer.
Source http://ift.tt/2d97Xid
