The Republicans and Donald Trump (with a major assist from the newspapers) threw a patty cake punch at the Clinton Foundation and came up with nothing but air. The counterpunch was strong and has landed with a thud.
The Trump Foundation must stop fundraising immediately, the New York attorney general’s office said Monday.
The state’s attorney general has notified Republican presidential nominee Donald Trumpthat his charitable foundation is violating New York law because it does not have the proper certification to solicit donations, The Washington Post first reported.
James Sheehan, head of the attorney general’s charities bureau, sent the notice to the foundation on Friday.
The notice follows a story that The Washington Post published last week that showed the foundation had been soliciting donations without being properly registered in New York state.
I doubt that Trump much cares that he can’t do any more fundraising for charity using his Donald J. Trump Foundation, but he’s got to be concerned about this:
The Trump Foundation never registered under article 7A of New York’s Executive Law, according to the Post, as is required for any charity asking for more than $25,000 per year from the public.
That means Trump’s foundation has avoided any of the outside audits New York law requires of larger charities.
“The Trump Foundation must immediately cease soliciting contributions or engaging in any other fundraising activities in New York,” Sheehan wrote to the Trump Foundation.Schneiderman ordered the foundation supply the state all the legal paperwork required of charities that solicit money from the public within 15 days, according to the Post.
The foundation must also provide all financial audit reports it should have provided in previous years.
Considering the fact that it’s now clear that Trump has used his foundation as a slush fund to hide income, avoid taxes, make illegal political contributions, spend other people’s money to falsely make himself look like a philanthropist and to give himself gifts, I can’t imagine that he will want to provide the New York attorney general with “all the financial audit reports it should have provided in previous years.”
The lesson?
Don’t throw a punch if you’re not prepared to take one in return.
I wonder if he still has enough pull in New York to dodge the worst of what he may have let himself in for.
The idea of him going to even country-club jail for his financial malfeasance makes me so giddy I can’t think straight.
In fairness, Trump did not initiate the Clinton Foundation BS it was the press trying to Gorify Hillary.
With no story, the press tried to manufacture one. That failed, too.
But Farenthold just did the mirror effort and hit paydirt as you would expect given Trump’ s inattention to detail and complete affinity for bullshit.
Which story will more Americans know and care about today and in the coming days:
1) Trump’s sleazy foundation (not unique among small family foundations)
or
2) Kim Kardashian West Robbed of Millions in Jewelry in Paris
If Trump arranged the robbery to raise money for his foundation, they will know about both!
Well, given the office conversations I’ve had, I think plenty of Anericans know Trump discussed Rosie O’Donnell at the debate. A management position has opened up and the running joke is to be sure not to bring her up during interviews.
Inquiring minds want to know!
Kim who?
Yeah, right. As if you don’t know. You can claim to be among that portion of men that haven’t been ogling her bod over the years, but her image is so ubiquitous in the media that only someone living in a cave can credibly claim total ignorance.
I have heard of her, needless to say. But I still have only the vaguest sense of of how and why she commands the media notice she does.
So when an acquaintance said she enjoyed watching her show, I seized the opportunity to ask What It’s All About. Her explanation was that she admires K.K.’s ability to “get away with anything” and the discipline required to live every moment of life in a state of camera-readiness.
Wait?
She has a show?
I thought she just posed for the paparazzi.
She’s like Paris Hilton: she’s famous for being famous.
I might be able to pick KK out of a lineup by dint of seeing her face on supermarket tabloids. Otherwise not. I like to joke that I’m a popular culture illiterate.
I remember Hilton had some dumb ass reality show about her living on an Arkansas farm with Lionel Ritchie’s daughter. After seeing that once I decided to burn the world, but I calmed down after a few weeks.
I can get why she commands attention from men — T&A always sells.
I don’t much like being a snob, but can’t help it when someone says they watch and admire K.K. (or any of the other fake reality show “stars”).
I couldn’t pick her out of a lineup.
Really?
I don’t own a tv, I’ve never watched her show, and even I know who she is.
I mean, I know who she is if you mean that I know that her father was friends with O.J. Simpson and that she got famous because of a sex tape. I know that she married Kanye West and that people like to talk about her rear end.
Beyond that, yeah, I don’t even really know her face.
Like you, I know WHO she is. But I couldn’t pick her out of a lineup. I don’t know why people find it so surprising that this is the case for a lot of us. I just have virtually no interest in celebrity culture.
you could show me a picture of my 20 favorite actors on television right now and I could maybe name 5 of them.
And movie actors?
I don’t know any of their names.
I just don’t care.
Running joke in college would be to ask me what song was playing in the bar. Wouldn’t know. But at the time I knew all 100 senators, so that was a good way to offset my lack of pop culture knowledge to drunken college kids.
To be honest, Marie, I’ve seen her name in a million headlines, but it’s always such assholery that I don’t pay any attention. I have very little idea who she is. Got better things to do with my life.
That question is condescending as hell. Some will care about one story, some the other.
And amazingly, some may even be able to pay attention to both stories at once and fit them in the same brain.
You mean that we Little People have the intelligence to do that?
Try to contain your shock.
I don’t see the point of this post. Is it to criticize the mass of people who are more concerned with celebrity culture than the current political state of affairs? Is it to downplay the Trump Scandals, Your Daily Update angle of the election, for who knows why (I assume “the issues”, which Clinton herself has been focusing on, today talking up anti-trust)? Or a mixture of the two. It’s baffling, really.
A gentle reminder that political junkies live in bubbles not inhabited by all voters. And the more both sides in those bubbles push on character components of the two major candidates, the more likely those not in the bubbles are to tune it all out and retreat into their preferred junk entertainment.
Is there anyone left that hasn’t figured out that Trump is a sleazebag blowhard? Does his tax return lead anyone to say, “OMG, I didn’t know! Well, that does it for me, I’m not voting for him?”
“And the more both sides in those bubbles push on character components of the two major candidates the more likely those not in the bubbles are to tune it all out and retreat into their preferred junk entertainment.”
Interesting remark coming from someone who has spent one helluva lot of time attacking Bill and Hillary Clinton over their character “components”. Note that I purposefully write “Bill and Hillary” because you’ve been pretty consistently pushing the idea that they’re inseparable.
Yeah so I guess WaPo and NYT should just stop reporting on it because by golly, you should have known Trump was a cheating lying scoundrel by now.
Where did I make any suggestion that the media shouldn’t do its job? Maybe, just maybe, if they did that over the years, we wouldn’t have had to suffer through Trump-Trump-Trump for seventeen months in this election cycle.
Considering the ubiquity of posts and comments here that voters, particularly GOP, voters are dumbshits, why the outrage in asking a question as to which of two breaking stories today will grab more eyeballs? That more people will care about?
Actually it does.
When was the last time you knocked doors for a candidate?
Given the predictable non-response to the question, my guess the answer is “never”.
A related question would be “when was the last time you voted for a Democrat in a presidential election? Or any Dem for that matter.”
possibly to (successfully) derail this diary into a discussion of something other than how crooked Trump is?
It wasn’t and I’m very sorry that it did. Although I do admit that Trump-Trump-Trump as discussion topics stopped being interesting to me over a year ago, and before then it was only because his candidacy was such an outrageous proposition and said more about celebrity media culture than US politics.
Then, if discussions of Trump are so boring for you, perhaps you should simply stay out of them and let other people discuss the topic at hand instead of launching yet another hijack to change the subject.
Just a thought.
Rarely have I hijacked a thread and none intentionally so. And I do stay completely out of a high percentage of FP Trump threads. Much prefer to participate in fladem nuts-and-bolts election diary threads and the threads attached to substantive diaries that others and I write. Of course often those that find me too threatening or challenging show up to nit-pick and attempt to hijack those threads as well.
Do you comment at all anymore other than to denigrate me?
Bwa-hahahahahahahaha!
How’s your Kardashian hijack goin’ for ya?
OT: Is Schumer working for a Democratic minority in the Senate? Just why is he sandbagging Metcalfe with a Begich write-in? I wish so much that people punish the Democratic establishment by making them win and govern.
Surely you jest? Murkowski is close enough to Schumer’s kind of Democrat that he wants her to win.
Do have to wonder if there are some internal polls that have Schumer a bit concerned. How is it even possible that the AK Democratic nominee could have a chance?
Or maybe he’s just poking a stick in the eye of Sanders’ Democrats for sport.
That seems to be the case. Hardly a Democrat at all.
Has something happened in the past ten days since Begich ruled out a write-in campaign? Or are you looking at older reports when he was urged to do so with some speculation that Schumer was involved?
In 2010 Murkowski won as the write-in candidate with 39% of the vote against GOP Miller at 35% and McAdams at 23%. Tough to see that a Murkowski-Miller rematch would give a Democrat, even one that Schumer dislikes, any chance. But sure would be nice if it did.
Glad he ruled it out. Hope no Schumerites in Alaska write in Begich.
The seemingly intentionally trying NOT to win is getting pretty transparent with the Democratic establishment.
Thanks for acknowledging the update.
Perhaps someone pointed out to Schumer that money spent on a Begich write-in to insure Murkowski’s re-election would be a waste. But it is amusing to see how freaked he gets at the remote possibility of a leftie Dem being elected to the Senate. Sure would like to see AK go rogue and choose the Democrat this time. (A girl can sometimes dream.)
Do we know whether audits of the Trump Foundation even exist? (I don’t know how a non-profit can exist without being audited.)
I would imagine the foundation has avoided audits like the plague as a matter of policy.
Do you mean to ask whether they keep the records you’d need to bring to an audit?
I guess we’re about to find out.
Records? Oh yeah about that…..
Of course, that is a good question, too, whether the Trump foundation has kept the records they would need for an audit to be conducted. But I thought it was a matter of good practice for a non-profit to engage an outside accounting firm to conduct an annual audit. My experience when working for a non-profit was that the audit was impportant to the board, and that funding sources usually required it as part of a grant application.
Pretty sure that the Trump Foundation would rather take a bath in sulphuric acid than invite “an outside accounting firm to conduct an annual audit” of their practices.
This foundation was originally nothing more than a way for Trump to take the proceeds from his best-selling book The Art of the Deal and use them for philanthropic purposes.
It was a P.R. stunt from that standpoint from the get-go.
But he stopped putting any of his own money into it a long time ago and began using it as a tax-avoidance vehicle. In lieu of direct payment for services rendered, he’d have people cut a check to the foundation. That way, he could avoid paying tax on it and diluting his billion dollar (of other people’s money) debt that he utilizes to operate all his businesses tax-free.
He almost never uses this money for charitable purposes, and when he does it is often to pay himself for use of his resorts and hotels.
He’s used it to buy auctioned items at charity events, even though it’s either not his money or it’s money that should have been taxed. Then he has been known to just keep the auctioned item for “storage.”
This makes him look like a philanthropist but he’s actually making money on the transactions.
Why would he ever want an audit from anyone outside his immediate family?
Audits would have caught him making illegal political contributions. They would have caught him laundering income. They would have caught him giving charitable gifts to himself.
No, he has not had these audits done, and he won’t willingly have them done now or ever.
He will close down the foundation and lawyer up.
I’m honestly a bit surprised at just how comically corrupt Trump is. It’s been an education. I mean, he’s no world-class fraud like executives on Wall Street banks. If he were, he’d be a multi-billionaire free and clear. This is a guy who was in real-estate/finance during the greatest and most lucrative period of fraud possibly in all of human history, and he couldn’t get a piece of any of that. He’s much more a compulsive, low-class fraud: self-dealing, tax-avoidance, skipping out on debts, running from bankruptcy, every kind of mail-order seen-on-tv scam imaginable…
But I mean, buying shitty paintings of yourself with “charity” money? I feel as if I have to stand back and sort of admire the sheer unstoppable moronic force of this guy’s corruption and tawdry vanity.