Cameos From Zion (#CameosFromZion) edited by Stephen Darori : TRUMP FOUNDATION

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Tuesday, November 22, 2016

#RIPUSA Trump Foundation admits to violating ban on ‘self-dealing,’ new filing to IRS shows

Trump Foundation admits to violating ban on ‘self-dealing,’ new filing to IRS shows By David A. Fahrenthold ( Republished with permission of the Author and the Washington Post)

Painter Michael Israel, left, poses with Donald and Melania Trump in 2007 at Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club. Trump spent $20,000 that belonged to the Donald J. Trump Foundation to buy a six-foot-tall portrait of himself painted by Israel. (Michael Israel)

President-elect Donald Trump’s charitable foundation has admitted to the IRS that it violated a legal prohibition against “self-dealing,” which bars nonprofit leaders from using their charity’s money to help themselves, their businesses or their families.

That admission was contained in the Donald J. Trump Foundation’s IRS tax filings for 2015, which were posted online Monday evening at the nonprofit-tracking site Guidestar. A Guidestar spokesman said the forms were uploaded by the Trump Foundation’s law firm, Morgan, Lewis and Bockius.

The Post could not immediately confirm if the same forms had actually been sent to the IRS.

In one section of the form, the IRS asked if the Trump Foundation had transferred “income or assets to a disqualified person.” A disqualified person, in this context, might be Trump — the foundation’s president — or a member of his family, or a Trump-owned business.

The foundation checked “yes.”

The Washington Post's David A. Fahrenthold explains how Donald Trump directed people who owed him money to make their payments to the tax-exempt Donald J. Trump Foundation instead. (Peter Stevenson, Lee Powell/The Washington Post)

Another line on the form asked if the Trump Foundation had engaged in any acts of self-dealing in prior years. The Trump Foundation checked “yes” again.

Such violations can carry penalties including excise taxes, and the charity leaders can be required to repay money that the charity spent on their behalf.

During the presidential campaign, The Washington Post reported on several instances in which Trump appeared to use the Trump Foundation’s money to buy items for himself or to help one of his for-profit businesses.

[Trump boasts about his philanthropy. But his giving falls short of his words.]

But the new Trump Foundation tax filings provided little detail, so it was unclear if these admissions were connected to the instances reported in The Post.

The Trump Foundation tax forms did not, for instance, describe any specific acts of self-dealing. They also did not say whether Trump had paid any penalties already. That kind of detail would be submitted on a separate IRS form, which was not included in the information posted online Monday.

Spokespeople for Trump’s presidential campaign did not respond to a request for comment sent early Tuesday morning.

Inside The Post's investigation of Donald Trump's charitable giving (Peter Stevenson, Julio Negron/The Washington Post)

The New York Attorney General’s office is investigating Trump’s charity, following up on reports in The Post that described apparent instances of self-dealing going back to 2007. A spokesperson for state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman declined to comment, other than to say “our investigation is ongoing.”

The IRS also did not immediately respond. That agency has not said if it is investigating the president-elect’s charity.

The Trump Foundation has existed since 1987. This appeared to be the first time that it had admitted committing such a violation.

Philip Hackney, who formerly worked in the IRS chief counsel’s office and now teaches at Louisiana State University, said he wanted to know why the Trump Foundation was now admitting to self-dealing in prior years — when, in all prior years, it had told the IRS it had done nothing of the kind.

“What transactions led to the self-dealing that they’re admitting to? Why weren’t they able to recognize them in prior years,” Hackney said. He said that, since the prior years’ returns were signed by Trump, that opened the president-elect to questions about what and how he had missed.

Trump Foundation 2015 tax filing

During the presidential campaign, The Post revealed several instances — worth about $300,000 — where Trump seemed to have used the Trump Foundation to help himself.

In two cases, The Post reported, the Trump Foundation appeared to pay legal settlements to end lawsuits that involved his for-profit businesses.

In one case, Trump settled a dispute with the town of Palm Beach, Fla., over a large flagpole he erected at his Mar-a-Lago Club. The town agreed to waive $120,000 in unpaid fines, if Trump’s club donated $100,000 to Fisher House, a charity helping wounded veterans and military personnel. The Trump Foundation paid that donation instead — effectively saving his business $100,000.

In another, Trump’s golf course in Westchester County, N.Y., had been sued by a man who had won a $1 million hole-in-one prize during a tournament at the course. The man had later been denied the money, because Trump’s course had allegedly made the hole too short for the prize to be valid.

The lawsuit was settled, and details on that final settlement have not been made public. But, on the day that the parties told the court that their lawsuit had been settled, the Trump Foundation donated $158,000 to the unhappy golfer’s charity. Trump’s golf course donated nothing.

In three other cases, Trump’s foundation paid for items that Trump or his wife purchased at charity auctions. In 2012, Trump bid $12,000 for a football helmet signed by then-Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow.

In another case, from 2007, Trump’s wife, Melania, bid $20,000 on a six-foot-tall portrait of Trump painted by “speed painter” Michael Israel during a gala at Mar-a-Lago. And in 2014, Trump bid $10,000 to buy a four-foot painting of himself by artist Havi Schanz at another charity gala.

[How a Univision anchor found the missing $10,000 portrait that Trump bought with his charity’s money]

In all three cases, the Trump Foundation paid the bill. Tax experts said that, by law, the items had to be put to charitable use. Trump’s spokespeople have not said what became of the helmet or the $20,000 portrait.

The $10,000 portrait was, however, located by Washington Post readers, following coverage of the Trump Foundation. It was hanging on the wall of the sports bar at Trump’s Doral golf resort, outside Miami.

In September, a Trump campaign spokesman rejected the idea that Trump had done anything wrong, by using his charity’s money to buy art for his bar. Instead, spokesman Boris Epshteyn said, the sports bar was doing the charity a favor by “storing” its art free of charge.

Tax experts said that this argument was unlikely to hold water.

“It’s hard to make an IRS auditor laugh,” Brett Kappel, a lawyer who advises nonprofit groups at the Akerman firm, told The Post then. “But this would do it.”

In the new 2015 tax filing, the Trump Foundation acknowledged for the first time that it owned these items. But it listed market values far below what the foundation had paid: the helmet was valued at $475. The portrait purchased for $20,000 was valued at $700. And the portrait purchased for $10,000 was valued at $500.

The tax filing did not give any details about where these items are or what charitable use Trump has in mind for them.

The Trump Foundation’s tax filing also shows that — for the first time in six years — the foundation received a donation from an entity controlled by Trump himself.

It lists a donation of $566,370 from the Trump Corporation, an entity 100 percent owned by Trump himself. It also lists a $50,000 gift from Trump Productions, a Trump-owned business that produced “The Apprentice.”

Previously, the last donation to the Trump Foundation from Trump or one of his businesses had come in 2008. Trump’s spokespeople did not respond to a question about the reason for these new gifts.

In addition, the Trump Foundation reported a $150,000 gift from the foundation of Viktor Pinchuk, a powerful Ukrainian steel magnate. That was the first such gift from Pinchuk.

Pinchuk, who supports closer ties between Ukraine and western nations, had also pledged large donations to the foundation of Trump’s presidential opponent, Hillary Clinton. Those donations, pledged to the Clinton Foundation while Clinton was secretary of state, raised questions about whether Clinton had conflicts of interest when she met with her family foundation’s donors.

A spokesman for Pinchuk’s foundation said that the gift was made as part of an agreement for Trump to speak — via video link — to a conference Pinchuk organized in September 2015. The conference, called the Yalta European Strategy Annual meeting, was held in Kiev. At the time of his 20-minute speech, titled “How New Ukraine’s Fate Affects Europe and the World,” Trump was already a presidential candidate.

Trump’s spokespeople did not respond to a question about Pinchuk’s gift.

Marc S. Owens, the former head of the IRS nonprofit division, noted that this was a rare contribution to the Trump Foundation from overseas. The only other foreign gifts were small ones from New Zealand and Canada in 2006 and 2008. And it was certainly the first from a foreigner who could seek to influence the foreign-policy agenda of a President Trump.

“The contribution points out a potential way for foreign donors to align themselves with [Trump],” Owens said.

The Post was first alerted to the 2015 tax filing by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal watchdog group. In a written statement, CREW spokesman Jordan Libowitz said many questions remained to be answered.

“Why were the Trumps unable to provide locations of the Foundation’s assets like paintings and football helmets . . . when they clearly remain in the possession of the Foundation? What assets do [they] admit to transferring to a ‘disqualified person?’” Libowitz wrote. “It’s pretty clear at this point that the IRS needs to investigate.”

In all, the 2015 tax filing shows that the Trump Foundation took in $781,000 and gave away $896,000 in grants during 2015. That left it with $1.1 million at year’s end, slightly down from the year before.

An early look at its outgoing grants showed a familiar pattern: Trump gave to a smattering of New York and Florida charities, plus a few connected to friends and business partners. Also, as he entered the presidential race, he gave to several nonprofits connected with conservative causes.

One of them was Project Veritas, the group run by conservative provocateur James O’Keefe, which has used hidden-camera stings to target liberal groups. Stephen Gordon, of Project Veritas, said that its point of contact had been Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s one-time campaign manager.

He said they had a brief meeting with Trump in 2015, at Trump Tower. Trump gave $10,000 from his foundation to the group, which is an IRS-certified nonprofit.

“We showed him a couple of videos. He thought that was really cool. And we walked out with a check. It was a typical donor meeting,” Gordon recalled.

#RIPUSA Trump Foundation admits to violating ban on ‘self-dealing,’ new filing to IRS shows

Trump Foundation admits to violating ban on ‘self-dealing,’ new filing to IRS shows By David A. Fahrenthold ( Republished with permission of the Author and the Washington Post)

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Donald Trump Tax Troll Tower Tramp:Trump not walking the walk on his tax claims. He promises to stick it to the rich, but there’s little in his plan that matches his rhetoric.

Trump not walking the walk on his tax claims.
He promises to stick it to the rich, but there’s little in his plan that matches his rhetoric.

Donald Trump, under fire over his taxes, is casting himself as a champion of the little guy when it comes to rewriting the tax code, but there’s little in his plan that matches his rhetoric.

His promises to stick it to the rich notwithstanding, independent analyses agree the top 1 percent would be the biggest beneficiaries of his plans to cut individual, business and capital gains rates.

Though his plan would dole out more than $4 trillion in tax cuts, one study found Trump would actually raise taxes on 38 million low- and middle-income Americans.

And while Trump has railed against the special-interest provisions that pock the tax code, he’s sought to protect breaks important to real estate, the bedrock of his business and one of the most lavishly subsidized industries in the code. Among them: a deduction for interest expenses critical to real-estate developers like himself.

“I don’t think there’s any connection between the rhetoric and what he’s actually proposed,” said Len Burman, head of the centrist Tax Policy Center. “What he’s actually proposed would benefit people like him.”

That sort of sharp difference between what Trump says his tax plan would do and how experts say it would shape tax law has endured throughout the campaign, even as Trump rolled out several versions of his tax reform plans.

But that gap has taken on new urgency after leaked documents from his 1995 tax return show he took a massive $916 million loss that he may have used to avoid paying federal taxes, perhaps for as long as 18 years. Many experts suspect those losses were generated in part by savvy use of tax breaks, particularly for the real estate industry.

Trump has done nothing to dispel that notion, and in fact may be fueling it. In the wake of the New York Times report, Trump has portrayed himself as a shrewd manipulator of the tax code who’s now going to use his hard-won expertise to create justice for average Americans.

“The unfairness of the tax laws is unbelievable,” Trump said at a campaign stop this week. “It’s something I’ve been talking about for a long time despite, frankly, being a big beneficiary of the laws. But I’m working for you now. I’m not working for Trump. Believe me.”

Though he’s heralded plans to go after so-called carried interest, a tax loophole important to wealthy money managers, as evidence of his willingness to turn on the rich, experts say the sting of those changes would be swamped by his other tax cuts.

The top 1 percent would see their after-tax incomes go up by as much as 19.9 percent, according to the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation, more than twice what it projected for those in the middle one-fifth of the income scale.

The Tax Policy Center, reviewing a previous draft of his plan, came to a similar conclusion. The top 1 percent would see an average tax cut of $275,000, the group said, compared with $2,700 for those in the middle of the income spectrum.

Some average Americans would actually see their taxes go up under Trump’s plan, according to an analysis by Lily Batchelder, a former Democratic tax aide now teaching at New York University, whose conclusions were seconded by the Tax Foundation.

That’s because Trump wants to junk personal exemptions as well as the head-of-household filing status, which subsidizes single parents. Trump would simultaneously expand the standard deduction they take, but for some, the losses would outstrip the gains, said Batchelder.

It’s become a major issue in the campaign, with Hillary Clinton — who’s called for big tax hikes on the rich — lambasting Trump’s plan.

“The kind of plan that Donald has put forth would be trickle-down economics all over again,” she said in the first debate. “Slashing taxes on the wealthy hasn’t worked.”

The gap between what Trump says his tax plan would do, and what it would actually do, began more than a year ago, when he first released his plan. Many observers were surprised when Trump, after railing against carried interest and other perks for the wealthy, produced a fairly conventional Republican tax plan. He proposed dropping carried interest as promised, but analysts agreed it was still a top-heavy plan.

Chastened by the analyses, as well as complaints over the plan’s costs, Trump revised his plan, promising to focus more of its benefits on average Americans.

“The tax relief will be concentrated on the working and middle class taxpayer,” he said last month. “They will receive the biggest benefit — it won’t even be close.”

Trump backed off some of his initial proposals, dialing back plans to cut the top marginal tax rate, for example, and proposing new limits on top-earners' tax breaks, such as cracking down on their ability to pass capital gains on to heirs tax-free.

Of course, it’s hardly surprising that a Republican tax plan would mostly benefit the wealthy. They’ve become increasingly boxed in by a tax code that’s quietly become the most progressive it’s been in at least a generation, in part because of tax hikes pushed through by President Barack Obama.

The top 1 percent paid 25.4 percent of all federal taxes in 2013, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, and the top 10 percent paid 69 percent of all taxes.

The middle one-fifth paid 8.9 percent, the agency said in a June report, and those in the bottom fifth of incomes paid 0.8 percent.

“It’s hard to avoid,” said Ryan Ellis, a Republican tax consultant. “Any time you want to cut taxes, almost by definition it is going to be a fairly regressive tax cut because the taxes that are left to cut tend to be concentrated at the top.”

What’s more, Clinton has largely ignored the issue of tax reform. If anything, experts say her plans to raise a host of taxes on the rich and give several targeted tax breaks to the middle class would make the code more complicated. Said Ellis: “I don’t get the sense she’s the least bit interested in tax reform.”

But some note that Trump — even as he says his experience in real-estate tax matters makes him uniquely qualified to tackle a tax-code rewrite — has proposed little in the way of reforming the breaks from which he’s benefited.

“He’s made a big deal in the last week about how we knows all about how people like him take advantage of tax laws, but I don’t think he has any specific provisions that would change the way we tax real estate,” said Burman. “He certainly hasn’t proposed anything that would hurt people like him.”

Saturday, October 1, 2016

Donald Trump and his Foundation of Fakery :Trump Foundation is no charity at all: New York AG says Trump lacks certification to collect funds.The Washington Post is out with another blockbuster report on Trump's "foundation of fakery"

Trump Foundation is no charity at all: New York AG says Trump lacks certification to collect funds.The Washington Post is out with another blockbuster report on Trump's "foundation of fakery"

(Credit: Reuters/Lucas Jackson)

Two weeks after New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced he had opened a broad inquiry into Donald Trump’s troubled foundation, a new report alleges the Republican nominee never actually obtained the certification that the state requires before charities can legitimately solicit money from the public.

According to exhaustive reporting by David A. Fahrenthold of The Washington Post, the Donald J. Trump Foundation never obtained the necessary certification to solicit money from the public during its nearly 30-year existence, an investigation by the state’s attorney general’s office has found.

ABC News has also confirmed the report.

New York law states that any charity that asks for more than $25,000 per year needs to obtain a special registration before soliciting offers. The Post, citing tax filings, reported that the Trump Foundation had raised more than $25,000 from outsiders in each of the last 10 years. The Post specifically detailed cases involving $2.3 million that raise questions about whether the money should have been taxed as income and whether that income was properly reported:

If New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D) finds that Trump’s foundation raised money in violation of the law, he could order the charity to stop raising money immediately. With a court’s permission, Schneiderman could also force Trump to return money that his foundation has already raised.

Despite claims of giving away millions of dollars of his own money, Trump has not donated to his namesake foundation since 2008.

Another Post report earlier this week claimed Trump spent $258,000 from his foundation to settle lawsuits that involved his businesses – an apparent violation of laws against “self-dealing,” which prohibit nonprofit leaders from using charity money to benefit themselves.

Of course, the Trump Foundation has adopted a very charitable definition for its charitable giving, which included a $25,000 campaign donation to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi just four days before her office decided not to participate in a lawsuit against Trump University.

The Daily Beast also reported Friday that in 2010, the Trump Foundation gave $10,000 to Jenny McCarthy’s Generation Rescue, a nonprofit group whose primary goal is to promote false links between vaccinations and autism.

“McCarthy’s charity promotes ‘alternative vaccination physicians’ and has a grant program to provide families with autistic children with vitamins, minerals, and supplements; urine testing; and ‘dietary intervention training,’” The Daily Beast noted.

I am being proven right about massive vaccinations—the doctors lied. Save our children & their future.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 3, 2014

So many people who have children with autism have thanked me—amazing response. They know far better than fudged up reports!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 4, 2014