

So unless he gave it to a street urchin or he used the helmet for something charitable, that was an illegal gift. If the charity buys the thing, it has to be used for charitable purposes. If you buy something from a charity for your own use, you have to use your own money. Trump paid for the helmet with money from the Trump Foundation. It’s important to know that, at literally the hour of the auction, Tim Tebow was playing the New England Patriots and being destroyed.

This gives you a sense of Trump as a businessman. It was to buy a Tim Tebow helmet at a charity auction. Komen Foundation breast cancer charity which got a donation of $12,000-sort of an odd number, so I called them. It turned out that the Trump Foundation was a story in itself and I didn’t realize that until I started calling charities. I started out thinking I was looking for evidence that Trump gave money out of his own pocket. One of the things that was amazing about this story was how my conception of what I was looking for at the beginning was at least partially wrong. After that all blew over, we thought, ‘well let’s go look at Trump’s charitable giving.’ If he’s willing to basically stiff veterans in the middle of a Republican presidential campaign, what’s he been willing to do before? We caught Trump trying to claim he had given a million dollars when he hadn’t. So finally Trump’s campaign manager called me and said, ‘just know he gave a million dollars away.’ I spent a couple days checking on that. In the process I learned more about how charity law works. Every time I called the Trump people or I called the organizations that were supposed to have been getting the money I couldn’t find the answers. Was it illegal that he was doing this? Where’s the rest of the money? So I thought, ‘I’ll spend a day and figure out where the rest of the money went.’ And it wasn’t a day, it wasn’t a week, it wasn’t two weeks. But the big checks only amounted to about a million dollars. He had said a few days earlier that he’d raised $6 million for veterans.

You can’t use your charity to boost your political campaign. I didn’t know much about charity then but I know that’s illegal. In the middle of a rally in Waterloo, Iowa, Donald Trump gives to a veterans group this big golf tournament-sized check for $100,000 from the Donald J. Edited excerpts: On covering Trump’s charitable foundation During a recent talk at the Nieman Foundation, he discussed his approach to reporting and how journalists need to reorient themselves to cover a president like no other. In January, he was named a contributor to CNN, where he will appear regularly in addition to his role with the newspaper. One told him about a charity event at which Trump claimed a seat on stage that had been set aside for a developer who had actually given a donation. The pictures he posted of handwritten lists from his reporter ’ s notebook told a stingy story, and his followers offered reporting help and tips. A reporter for The Washington Post since 2000, he is best known for his exhaustive dive into the financial dealings of then candidate Donald Trump ’ s charitable organization as well as his acquisition of the “ Access Hollywood ” videotape in which the candidate bragged about sexually assaulting women.įrustrated in his efforts to find out about charitable donations Trump said he had made, Fahrenthold turned to Twitter, where he now has more than 300,000 followers. David Fahrenthold tapped into the power of social media when researching Trump's charitable giving, enlisting his followers for helpįew reporters covering the 2016 presidential election had as many memorable scoops and were as successful at using Twitter to crowdsource research as David Fahrenthold.
