A Tale of Two Foundations - One candidate has a sketchy family foundation but it's not Hillary...

[DonViejo]

A Tale of Two Foundations
One candidate has a sketchy family foundation but it's not Hillary Clinton.

By Robert Schlesinger | Managing Editor

Sept. 16, 2016, at 6:00 a.m.

It's a seamy and unsettling web: There's the nominee's oh so shady charitable foundation and its burgeoning pay-for-play scandal; there's the opaque network of financial relationships that stretches around the globe, raising very real national security concerns if the nominee becomes the president-elect.

The candidate and his foundation, of course, both bear the name Donald Trump. And while Trump and the right wing noise machine have made the Clinton Foundation synonymous with modern political corruption, like so many Trump charges these seem to be more about hiding the former reality TV star's faults by projecting them onto someone else.

Take his foundation, which he started in 1987 with the purpose of giving away the profits from his book, "The Art of the Deal." But, thanks to the tireless reporting of The Washington Post's David Fahrenthold, we know that in the last 10 years it's become more of a pass-through for other people's gifts, with Trump slapping his name on them. The candidate and his surrogates have claimed that he is a generous philanthropist on the order of tens of millions of dollars, but Fahrenthold has spent months trying to track down any evidence of this with little success (his running https://twitter.com/Fahrenthold?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor" target="_blank">Twitter chronicle of his efforts is high entertainment). He found that, per the most recent public records, Trump hasn't given any of his own money to his foundation since 2008 and between then and his becoming the GOP nominee (when high-profile acts of charity became politically beneficial) he seems to have given only one charitable donation from his own pocket to anyone – a gift of less than $10,000 to the Police Athletic League of New York in 2009 (but that "may also be a bookkeeping error&quot .

Trump's foundation hasn't gone dormant: "Since then, all of the donations have been other people's money – an arrangement that experts say is almost unheard of for a family foundation," Fahrenthold reported last weekend. "Trump then takes that money and does with it as he pleases. In many cases, he passes it on to other charities, which often are under the impression that it is Trump's own money." Suckers.

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http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-09-16/the-clinton-foundation-vs-the-trump-foundation?emailed=1&src=usn_thereport