Uncovering Trump Read online

  Uncovering Trump

  The Truth Behind Donald Trump’s Charitable Giving

  David A. Fahrenthold,

  The Washington Post

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

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  Copyright © 2017 by The Washington Post

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition April 2017

  ISBN: 978-1-63576-158-0

  Table of Contents

  The behind-the-scenes story of my year covering Trump

  The Stories What ever happened to all that money Trump raised for the veterans?

  Missing from Trump’s list of charitable giving: His own personal cash

  Four months after fundraiser, Trump says he gave $1 million to veterans group

  Trump promised millions to charity. We found less than $10,000 over 7 years.

  Trump promised personal gifts on ‘Celebrity Apprentice.’ Here’s who really paid.

  Trump pays IRS a penalty for his foundation violating rules with gift to aid Florida attorney general

  How Donald Trump retooled his charity to spend other people’s money

  Trump used $258,000 from his charity to settle legal problems

  Trump Foundation ordered to stop fundraising by N.Y. attorney general’s office

  Trump recorded having extremely lewd conversation about women in 2005

  Trump boasts about his philanthropy. But his giving falls short of his words.

  Donald Trump plans to shut down his charitable foundation, which has been under scrutiny for months

  About the Author

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  The behind-the-scenes story of my year covering Trump

  By David A. Fahrenthold

  Dec. 27, 2016

  Photo illustration of David Fahrenthold by Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post

  “Arnold and Tim, if you’d come up, we’re going to give you a nice, beautiful check,” Donald Trump said. He held up an oversize check, the kind they give to people who win golf tournaments. It was for $100,000. In the top-left corner the check said: “The Donald J. Trump Foundation.”

  Along the bottom, it had the slogan of Trump’s presidential campaign: “Make America Great Again.”

  This was in February.

  The beginning of it.

  Trump was in Waterloo, Iowa, for a caucus-day rally at the Five Sullivan Brothers Convention Center — named for five local siblings who had been assigned to the same Navy cruiser in World War II. They all died when the ship went down at Guadalcanal.

  Trump had stopped his rally to do something presidential candidates don’t normally do. He was giving away money.

  Arnold and Tim, whom he had called to the stage, were from a local veterans group. Although their big check had Trump’s name on it, it wasn’t actually Trump’s money. Instead, the cash had been raised from other donors a few days earlier, at a televised fundraiser that Trump had held while he skipped a GOP debate because of a feud with Fox News.

  Trump said he had raised $6 million that night, including a $1 million gift from his own pocket. Now Trump was giving it, a little at a time, to charities in the towns where he held campaign events.

  “See you in the White House,” one of the men said to Trump, leaving the stage with this check that married a nonprofit’s name and a campaign’s slogan.

  “He said, ‘We’ll see you in the White House,’ ” Trump repeated to the crowd. “That’s nice.”

  After that, Trump lost Iowa.

  He won New Hampshire.

  Then he stopped giving away money.

  But as far as I could tell, just over $1.1 million had been given away. Far less than what Trump said he raised. And there was no sign of the $1 million Trump had promised from his own pocket.

  So what happened to the rest of the money?

  It sounded like an easy question that the Trump campaign could answer quickly. I thought I’d be through with the story in a day or two.

  I was wrong.

  That was the start of nine months of work for me, trying to dig up the truth about a part of Trump’s life that he wanted to keep secret. I didn’t understand — and I don’t think Trump understood, either — where that one check, and that one question, would lead.

  I’ve been a reporter for The Washington Post since 2000, covering everything from homicide scenes in the District to Congress to the World Championship Muskrat Skinning Contest. (People race to see who skins a dead muskrat the fastest. There’s also a beauty pageant. Some women compete in both.)

  By the time I got to that Trump event in Waterloo, I’d been covering the 2016 presidential election for 13 months, since the last weeks of 2014. But I had the track record of a mummy’s curse: Just about every campaign I had touched was dead.

  I had, for instance, covered former New York governor George Pataki’s (failed) attempt to get people to recognize him in a New Hampshire Chipotle. Pataki dropped out. I read the collected works of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and made a list of everything the old Baptist preacher had ever condemned as immoral or untoward. The subjects of his condemnation ranged from college-age women going braless to dogs wearing clothes to Beyoncé. Huckabee condemned me. Then he dropped out, too.

  I went to St. Louis to write about a speech given by former Texas governor Rick Perry. In the middle of the speech, Perry dropped out.

  So by the time the New Hampshire primaries were over, the candidates I had covered were kaput. I needed a new beat. While I pondered what that would be, I decided to do a short story about the money Trump had raised for veterans.

  I wanted to chase down two suspicions I’d brought home with me from that event in Iowa. For one thing, I thought Trump might have broken the law by improperly mixing his foundation with his presidential campaign. I started calling experts.

  “I think it’s pretty clear that that’s over the line,” Marc S. Owens, the former longtime head of the Internal Revenue Service’s nonprofit division, told me when I called him.

  Then Owens kept talking, and the story started deflating.

  In theory, Owens said, nonprofit groups like the Trump Foundation are “absolutely prohibited” from participating or intervening in a political campaign. But, he said, if the IRS did investigate, it wouldn’t likely start until the Trump Foundation filed its paperwork for 2016. Which wouldn’t be until late 2017. Then an agent would open a case. There went 2018. Finally, Owens said, the IRS might take action: It might even take away the Trump Foundation’s tax-exempt status.

  In 2019. Or maybe not ever.

  Owens doubted that the IRS — already under scrutiny from the GOP-run Congress after allegations it had given undue scrutiny to conservative groups — would ever pick a fight with Trump.

  “I don’t think anything’s going to happen” to Trump, Owens said. “But, theoretically, it could.”

  My other suspicion was that Trump was still sitting on the bulk of the money he had raised for veterans — including the $1 million he had promised from himself.

  I asked Trump’s people to account for all this money. They didn’t.

  Then, finally, I got a call.

  “The money is fully spent,” Corey Lewandowski, then Trump’s campaign manager, told me in late May. “Mr. Trump’s money is fully spent.”

  But, Lewandowski told me, the details of Trump’s $1 million in gifts were secret. He wouldn’t say which groups Trump had donated to. Or when. Or in what amounts.

  This was an important assertion — that Trump had delivered on a signature campaign promise — made without proof. I didn’t want to just take Lewandowksi’s word for it.

  So I tried to prove him right.

  I spent a day searching for Trump’s money on Twitter, asking vets’ organizations if they’d gotten any of it. I used Trump’s Twitter handle, @realdonaldtrump, because I wanted Trump to see me searching.

  Trump saw.

  The next night, he called me to say he had just then given away the $1 million, all in one swoop, to a nonprofit run by a friend. That meant when Lewandowski said Trump’s money was “fully spent,” it was actually still in Trump’s pocket.

  On the phone, I asked Trump: Would you really have given this money away if I hadn’t been asking about it?

  “You know, you’re a nasty guy,” he said. “You’re really a nasty guy.”

  A few days later, Trump held a news conference in Trump Tower, where he answered my other question. Where was the remainder of the money Trump had raised from other donors, four months earlier? Turns out, it had been sitting in the Trump Foundation, unspent. In this news conference, Trump announced that he had given the last of it away — and he lashed out at the media for asking him to account for the money.

  “Instead of being like, ‘Thank you very much, Mr. Trump,’ or ‘Trump did a good job,’ everyone said : ‘Who got it? Who got it? Who got it?’ And you make me look very bad,” Trump said. “I have never received such bad publicity for doing such a good job.”

  Because my stories had led to this angry moment, I was on “Morning Joe” and CNN and Lawrence O’Donnell. The New York Times and Le Monde referenced my work. My dad wrote t
o say how proud he was of me. I read pundits predicting that the presidential race itself would change. They said the old trope about Trump — that he was a Teflon candidate, immune to accountability — was now disproved.

  When I came home from my last TV hit, the kids, ages 4 and 5 months, were asleep. The house was quiet. I was still full of caffeine and do-gooder energy and decided to tidy up.

  Among the clutter on the coffee table, I found my 4-year-old’s Party Popper, a bright yellow gun that fired confetti. For some reason, I held the gun up to my eye and looked down the barrel, the way Yosemite Sam always does.

  It looked unloaded.

  Then, for some reason, I pulled the trigger.

  When I got to the ER, I had a swollen face, metal-foil confetti in my hair and a faint odor of gun smoke. Finally, the doctor could see me.

  “I shot myself in the eye with a glitter gun,” I said. I showed him the Party Popper, which I had brought with me, in case he wanted to send it off to the National Institute of Morons for further study.

  I got home from the hospital with a scratched cornea and a tube of eye ointment. The next day, with some of my dignity permanently lost, I got started on a bigger story.

  The idea for this story had come from our executive editor, Marty Baron. One night, as we both waited for an elevator, Marty offered a suggestion.

  Why don’t you go beyond Trump’s promises to give to veterans, he said, and look at Trump’s giving to charity, period?

  The logic was that Trump had just tried to wiggle out of a charitable promise he’d made on national TV. What, Marty wondered, had he been doing before the campaign, when nobody was looking?

  That reporting process started with a lot of paper.

  Working with one of The Post’s ace researchers, Alice Crites, I went digging for records that would reveal Trump’s charitable giving, going back to his early days as a Manhattan developer in the 1980s. We looked at old news clippings, detailing Trump’s public statements. And we looked at tax filings from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, which had been dug out of storage by New York state.

  Those two sources told two very different stories.

  In the news clippings, you could see that Trump had repeatedly made public promises to donate to charity. In the 1980s, for instance, Trump had promised to give away $4 million from sales of his book “The Art of the Deal.” In more recent years, he said he would give away $2.5 million he made off “The Apprentice.” And donated the profits from Trump University. All told, the pledges in those news clips made it seem that Trump had given away more than $12 million.

  In more recent clippings, in fact, Trump’s presidential campaign staff said his actual giving had been far higher than that: “tens of millions ” over his lifetime.

  The state’s records showed something else.

  They showed that the Trump Foundation — which Trump had set up to give away his own money — had received only a total of $5.5 million from Trump since 1987.

  So where was all that other money that he said he had been donating?

  “We want to keep them private. We want to keep them quiet,” Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of Trump’s business, had told me about the missing money. “He doesn’t want other charities to see it. Then it becomes like a feeding frenzy.”

  Once again, I didn’t want to take his word for it.

  So I set out — using Twitter — to try to prove Trump right.

  I started making a list of charities I thought were most likely to have received money from Trump’s own pocket. Nonprofits that had received donations from the Trump Foundation. Charities whose galas Trump had attended. Causes he’d praised on Twitter.

  In each case, I called the charity and asked if it had ever received a donation from Trump — and, if so, when. Then, I wrote the charity’s name and its response on a legal pad and posted pictures of the legal pad to Twitter.

  My list started to grow: 100 charities. 150. 200.

  In all those calls, a pattern began to emerge. In the years between 2008 and 2015 — when Trump wasn’t giving money to the Trump Foundation — he didn’t seem to have given much to other people’s charities, either. The only gift I could find in that range was from 2009, when he was credited with giving less than $10,000 to the Police Athletic League of New York City.

  250 charities.

  As the circus of the 2016 campaign swirled around me — Twitter beefs, Trump’s criticisms of a Gold Star family and a Mexican American federal judge — I stayed focused on this small slice of Trump’s life. After a while, my 4-year-old daughter started talking about the Trump Foundation at dinner, just because her parents talked about nothing else. “He should give the money to the people, so the people get the money,” she said. “It’s not nice.”

  I called 300 charities.

  325.

  This story started to remind me of one of the weirdest stories I’ve ever done: a 2014 tale about the federal government’s giant paperwork cave.

  The cave was about 45 minutes north of Pittsburgh. The Office of Personnel Management kept federal employees’ personnel records in 28,000 file cabinets inside the caverns of an abandoned limestone mine. There were 600 federal employees down there. Cave clerks. Their job was to assemble and collate paperwork from the caverns and use that paperwork to compute how much individual federal employees would receive in benefits when they retired. The cave clerks worked in an absurdist parody of government inefficiency, which was as slow in 2014 as it was in the 1970s.

  In reporting jargon, I’d tried the front door: I asked to tour the mine. OPM said no. So then I went looking for windows. I sought out ex-employees, who had firsthand knowledge of the place but weren’t beholden to OPM’s desire for secrecy.

  I found them. By piecing together their recollections, I got the story that the government didn’t want me to find.

  Now Trump himself was the abandoned limestone mine.

  If he wouldn’t tell me what he had given away, I’d try to find the answer anyway — by talking to charities with firsthand knowledge of what he had given.

  When I reached No. 325 on my list, I yanked on a window, and it gave.

  “They ended up purchasing a Michael Israel portrait of Donald Trump,” said Matthew Ladika, the CEO of a Florida children’s charity called HomeSafe.

  I had called this charity — which I knew had received $20,000 from the Trump Foundation — to ask if it had ever received anything else, from Trump’s own pocket. It had not. But Ladika told me something I didn’t expect: the reason for that $20,000 gift from Trump’s charity.

  Trump had used it to buy a portrait of himself.

  The portrait had been painted by a “speed painter,” who was the entertainment at a charity gala at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club. Melania Trumpbought it for $20,000. But then, later, Trump paid for it with a check from the Trump Foundation.

  That raised a new set of questions. Tax law prohibits “self-dealing,” which is when charity leaders use their nonprofits’ money to buy things for themselves. If Trump hung that portrait on the wall at one of his resorts, for instance, he’d be breaking the law. So where was the portrait now?

  I asked Trump’s people. They didn’t respond.

  I tried a Google Images search, feeding it a photo of the portrait, which showed Trump’s painted face.

  “Best guess for this image: Orange,” Google said.

  I got a screen full of oranges. Orange juice. Orange Julius. No portraits.

  I kept looking, posting details of my search to Twitter. Soon I had attracted a virtual army, ready to join the scavenger hunt. I had begun the year with 4,700 Twitter followers. By September I had more than 60,000 and climbing fast. I began hearing from celebrities and even a few personal heroes, offering their assistance out of the blue. The barbecue columnist for Texas Monthly — an idol to me, as a journalist and a native Texan — was watching videos of other people’s parties taken at a Trump golf resort. He thought he’d spotted the painting in the background (he hadn’t). Kathy Griffin, the actress, called me with her memories about visiting the set of Trump’s “The Celebrity Apprentice.” Mark Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks owner, was sending me links on Twitter, new leads on Trump promises.