New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has already been involved for months in various investigations into the dubious dealings and reports concerning the Trump Foundation. However, a new report from Forbes that appeared earlier this week seems to have sparked further investigations from the New York attorney general’s office.
“The attorney general's office is looking into the issues raised by this report," said Eric Soufer, the communications director for the New York state attorney general.
One potential issue: The Donald J. Trump Foundation donated $100,000 to the Eric Trump Foundation, with the intent of covering the costs for payments to a Donald Trump-owned property, according to Ian Gillule, who worked at Trump National Westchester during two stints from 2006 to 2015.
“That appears on its face to be an indirect act of self-dealing,” said former IRS official Marcus Owens, before the original story published on Tuesday.
“That is going to be of great interest to the attorney general of New York,” Owens added.
That’s one of the issues being looked into; another issue may be the singularly reprehensible reports that in recent years, the Eric Trump Foundation, which boasts bigly support of children’s cancer research, has been bigly giving a lot more of its foundation money back to the Trump family business. What started as a charity golf tournament that had little overhead costs—being on the Trump-branded golf courses, with “comped” golfing equipment—soon began to have attributes that some might say resembled a “money-laundering” operation.
THE COSTS FOR ERIC'S golf tournament quickly escalated. After returning, in 2012, to a more modest $59,000--while the event brought in a record $2 million--the listed costs exploded to $230,000 in 2013, $242,000 in 2014 and finally $322,000 in 2015 (the most recent on record, held just as Trump was ratcheting up his presidential campaign), according to IRS filings. This even though the amount raised at these events, in fact, never reached that 2012 high.
It's hard to find an explanation for this cost spike. Remember, all those base costs were supposedly free, according to Eric Trump. The golf course? "Always comped," he says. The merchandise for golfers: "The vast majority of it we got comped." Drinks: "Things like wine we were normally able to get donated." And the evening performances from musicians like Dee Snider of Twisted Sister and comedians like Gilbert Gottfried: "They did it for free." So many sponsors donated, in fact, that the event invitation has carried enough logos to make a Nascar team proud.
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Thus it's hard to figure out what happened to the money. All the listed costs are direct expenses: Items like overhead and salaries appear elsewhere in its IRS filings. Even if the Eric Trump Foundation had to pay the full rate for literally everything, Forbes couldn't come up with a plausible path to $322,000 given the parameters of the annual event (a golf outing for about 200 and dinner for perhaps 400 more). Neither could golf tournament experts or the former head golf professional at Trump National Westchester. "If you gave me that much money to run a tournament, I couldn't imagine what we could do," says Patrick Langan, who worked at the club from 2006 to 2015. "It certainly wasn't done that way."
I’m surprised we do not have more pictures of the Trump family constantly wearing oxygen masks with all of the smoke wafting out of every place they go.