Nobody ought to be surprised to hear of the belated demise of the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a racketeering enterprise under investigation by the state authorities in New York for the past two years. Barbara Underwood, the state attorney general, announced that the foundation will dissolve and its assets distributed to bona fide charitable groups. She seeks to prohibit its overseers, President Trump and his adult children, from serving on the board of any nonprofit in New York for the foreseeable future.
Raking through the foundation’s records since 2016, Underwood found what she described as “a shocking pattern of illegality,” which included not only various self-serving schemes to bolster Trump businesses and stroke Trump’s ego but also multiple (and unlawful) expenditures to advance his presidential campaign. The largest donation went to restore a fountain outside the Plaza Hotel in New York when Trump owned it. The smallest went to the Boy Scouts and appeared to be Donald Trump Jr.’s enrollment fee.
Trump misused the assets of one scam, the Trump Foundation, to protect another, Trump University. He sent a $25,000 foundation check to Florida Attorney General Pamela Bondi — an illegal donation — around the time she was considering whether to open a fraud probe into his fake educational institution. He raised millions for a veterans charity and then let Corey Lewandowksi direct the distribution of those funds in Iowa on the eve of the 2016 Republican caucuses. That violated the law, too.
View the complete December 19 article by Joe Conason on the Creators.com website here.