Through Eric Trump's foundation, which supports child cancer research, the president's Donald J. Trump Foundation appeared to have funneled $100,000 worth of charity donations into the Trump family's coffers, according to a report from Forbes magazine.
Eric Trump, the president’s third eldest child, has held the Eric Trump Foundation golf invitational annually for the past 10 years at the Trump National Golf Club in New York. The event has raised more than $11 million for the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis to date, Forbes reported.
Eric Trump told the magazine that a vast majority of the expenses incurred in holding the charity event were comped, including use of the golf course, entertainment, drinks and nearly all the merchandise given to golfers. However, IRS tax documents showed that the event suffered from ballooning overhead costs, starting in about 2011.
“In the early years, they weren’t being billed (for the club) – the bills would just disappear,” Ian Gilule, former membership and marketing director at Trump National Westchester, told Forbes. But after Donald Trump realized that his son was not being charged for use of the golf course, “Mr. Trump had a cow,” Gilule said.
“He flipped,” he said. “He was like ‘We’re donating all of this stuff, and there’s no paper trail? No credit?’ And he went nuts. He said, ‘I don’t care if it’s my son or not – everybody gets billed.’”
To offset the cost of reserving the Trump National Golf Club, the Donald J. Trump Foundation donated $100,000 to the Eric Trump Foundation – money that went directly to the Trump Organization, according to Forbes.
“In effect … this maneuver would appear to have more in common with a drug cartel’s money-laundering operation than a charity’s best-practices textbook,” the magazine reported. “That $100,000 in outside donations to the Donald J. Trump Foundation … passed through the Eric Trump Foundation and wound up in the coffers of Donald Trump’s private businesses.”
Another $500,000, donated over the course of 10 years and earmarked for children’s cancer research, “was re-donated to other charities, many of which were connected to Trump family members or interests, including at least four groups that subsequently paid to hold golf tournaments at Trump courses,” according to Forbes.
Donald Trump announced plans in December to dissolve his charity foundation “to avoid even the appearance of any conflict with my role as President," he said in a statement.
His plans were stymied by the New York attorney general's office, which said in a statement to The New York Times that the foundation could not be dissolved until after investigators wrapped up a probe of whether the Trump Foundation was used to financially benefit Trump himself.
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