Donald Trump's use of charity donations raises eyebrows
In recent years, Donald Trump’s charity foundation has spent more than a quarter of a million dollars to settle lawsuits brought against Trump’s for-profit companies, a Washington Post investigation found. Almost all of that money came from donors not named Trump.
In North Carolina Tuesday, the Republican nominee said he likes to use “other people’s money” in business deals -- much like the way his charity is operated. Without irony, Trump said he would bring that same philosophy to at least one aspect of foreign policy, reports CBS News correspondent Major Garrett.
“We cannot have these people come into the United States, we don’t know who they are, we know nothing about ‘em,” Trump told a crowd in Kenansville, North Carolina.
At his rally, Trump offered two remedies to terror threats: tougher screening of immigrants and safe zones for Syrian war refugees -- the latter paid for by wealthy Gulf states.
“It’s called OPM. I do that all the time in business,” Trump said. “It’s called ‘other people’s money.’ There’s nothing like doing things with other people’s money.”
That’s an apt description of Trump’s foundation, which has allegedly used funds for Trump’s personal benefit and business gain.
The Washington Post’s David Farenthold, who has investigated Trump’s charity for months, weighed in on the latest controversy.
“I talked to tax experts who said they’ve never seen anybody do anything like what he’s done in the last few years which is use the money in his charity to basically pay off legal settlements of his for-profit businesses,” Farenthold told CBS News.
Trump hasn’t given to his own foundation since 2008, and nearly all of the money has come from other donors.
Tax documents showed Trump’s foundation wrote a $100,000 check in 2007 to Fisher House, a veterans housing charity, to settle a local zoning lawsuit over an oversized flagpole at his Mar-a-Lago club.
And the foundation sent $158,000 to the charity of a man who sued when Trump withheld one million dollars in prize money, due after that man scored a hole-in-one at Trump’s golf course in 2010.
And in 2014, the foundation paid $10,000 for a portrait of Trump himself.
Last night, Trump’s running mate Mike Pence repeated campaign claims that the Washington Post story was riddled with inaccuracies. But when pressed to name those inaccuracies, Pence could not identify a single example.