Trump’s fraud has caught up with him
A brief interlude in my fulminations at the outing of Ferrante – yes that’s going to be continuing for a bit – to share the breaking news that a judge has ordered Trump’s “foundation” to stop soliciting donations.
The New York attorney general has notified Donald Trump that his charitable foundation is violating state law — by soliciting donations without proper certification — and ordered Trump’s charity to stop its fundraising immediately, the attorney general’s office said Monday.
James Sheehan, head of the attorney general’s charities bureau, sent the “notice of violation” to the Donald J. Trump Foundation on Friday, according to a copy of the notice provided by the press office of state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D).
The night before that, The Washington Post reported that Trump’s charity had been soliciting donations from other people without being properly registered in New York state.
Now why would he fail to register his foundation? Hmm.
But the Trump Foundation never registered under article 7A of New York’s Executive Law, as is required for any charity soliciting more than $25,000 a year from the public. One important consequence: Trump’s foundation avoided rigorous outside audits, which New York law requires of larger charities that ask the public for money.
Ah. Maybe he didn’t want to be audited. I wonder why that might be.
Schneiderman ordered the Trump Foundation to supply the state, within 15 days, with all the legal paperwork required of charities that solicit money from the public.
In addition, Sheehan ordered that Trump’s foundation provide all the financial audit reports it should have provided in prior years, when it raised money without legal permission. He said that if Trump’s foundation did not stop its fundraising and file the proper paperwork, that would be considered “a continuing fraud upon the people of New York.”
Busted.
Are excessive levels of schadenfreude in any way a health hazard? Asking for a friend.
Maybe he should have just called it a church?
Ah but just like not paying his taxes, not registering his foundation shows how smart he is!
Yeah I have a very high schadenfreude count too. Monitoring it closely.
It sounds to me as if it could genuinely bite him on the ass…because the audits are going to show he’s been a naughty boy. He could go where Bernie Madoff went.
I must confess I don’t know…
A bit bemused/unsurprised they’re grumbling it’s political. AG _does_ have a job to do, here. Sure, they may be oddly more gleeful to take this one/might have fistfights breaking out in the office over who gets to prosecute, but it’s not like you get to say, oh, he’s running for president, surely this can wait…
Ask me, the guy’s had a few passes too many already. Always kinda suspected the only reason he’s not answering for incitement is law enforcement didn’t want his more thuggish followers flipping out further, and maybe some confused if understandable concern about the bounds of political expression, and not meddling with the process. Some people, you give them that inch, though…
“Ah but just like not paying his taxes, not registering his foundation shows how smart he is!”
Exactly, because now he can say that using the Foundation’s money to pay legal judgments against him, buy arguably terrible portraits and bribe the Florida Attorney General weren’t illegal, because the charity isn’t really a charity after all. That would seem to fit his logic.
Nah, audit’s for losers … Oops!