A few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal went around trying to find out whether or not the numerous veteran charities that Donald Trump raised a purported $6 million for had received the money Donald Trump had promised. Trump threw a big veterans charity rally in lieu of attending the Iowa debate during his spat with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly. At the time, around $4 million of the money was still unaccounted for. After four more weeks, Chris Cuomo and CNN sent their correspondent Drew Griffin to try and find out if there’s been any more accounting for the missing money.
Drew Griffin: We found the same thing that you found Chris, a lot of promises and not a lot of answers and it just shouldn’t be that hard, number one in the big scheme of things it’s just not that much money and the accounting is not that difficult to do.
Since the Trump campaign has been unable to account for the money, Griffin has been trying to go to the individual charities—who he says have also been difficult to get answers from. Last month the WSJ was able to locate $2.4 million and this month CNN was able to bring that tally all the way up to [drum roll] $2.9 million! We did it, everyone. We were able to account for about half the money that Donald Trump says he raised and donated to charity. At this pace, we will all know what happened to all of the money by election day.
What’s problematic here is that this really is a very small amount of money in a campaign that costs a lot more money to run. The inability to maintain a decent amount of transparency can only be symptoms of a few things, and none of those things are good:
Fraud.
Mismanagement.
If you want to be the head executive of the U.S. you need to be able to account for simple things, and if you can’t or don’t want to, you need to at least be able to lie about it with some level of competence.
Chris Cuomo’s interview with Drew Griffin right below.