White House slips up and admits Donald Trump’s ‘personal donation’ to Hurricane Harvey may involve a phony charity

| 12:55 am EDT September 2, 2017
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Donald Trump, sinking in the polls and coming off a botched response to Hurricane Harvey, tried to score some feel-good points by having his White House announce that he was donating a million dollars in personal money to hurricane relief. This sent up red flags, because Trump has a history of promising charitable donations and then never making them. Now his White House is admitting that his supposed ‘personal donation’ may actually be from a phony charity.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced during a press briefing televised on C-SPAN that Trump was “pledging a million dollars of personal money to the fund.” She then curiously went on to say that Trump wanted her to check with reporters to find out which charities they thought should receive his donation. If that wasn’t suspicious enough, she later came back and changed her story about where the money was coming from.

At a later briefing, Huckabee Sanders was asked which charities Trump had decided to donate the million dollars to, and whether the money was truly coming from his own pocket or from his “Trump Foundation” charity. She tried to dodge the question by once again suggesting that the media should decide where his donation should go. When the reporter pressed her further about where the money was coming from, she admitted the money may indeed be coming from the foundation. That was a startling admission, because the “Trump Foundation” is a long defunct and by now essentially phony charity that’s in the process of being shut down, amid a fraud investigation by the State of New York.

According to its own publicly available tax filings, the Trump Foundation hasn’t received any donations from Donald Trump since 2008, and in turn it ceased making any sizable donations around 2010. Since that time, Donald Trump has instead used his foundation as a personal piggy bank, using it to buy a six foot tall painting of himself among other improprieties. That led the New York State Attorney General to launch an investigation, prompting Trump to preemptively try to shut down the foundation. The AG then told him he wasn’t allowed to shut it down until the probe was finished. Yet now Trump appears to be pretending to donate a million dollars from his phony charity to Hurricane Harvey relief. No wonder he’s unwilling to name the relief fund that’s supposed to receive this non-existent money.