President Barack Obama went to Philadelphia on Sept. 13 to
campaign for Hillary Clinton, who was recovering from pneumonia. In his
speech, Obama didn’t hold back in his critique of Clinton’s opponent,
Donald Trump.
In one particularly vivid line, Obama took a shot at Trump’s
foundation, contrasting it with the Clintons’ foundation, which focuses
on improving global health.
The Clinton Foundation has been attacked by critics for taking money
from donors who might have business before a future President Clinton.
But Obama was having none of it.
"You want to debate foundations and charities?" Obama said. "One
candidate's family foundation has saved countless lives around the
world. The other candidate's foundation took money other people gave to
his charity and then bought a six-foot-tall painting of himself."
Obama added, to laughter, "I mean, you know, he had the taste not to go for the 10-foot version, but…"
We have
previously written about how the Clinton Foundation helped 9 million people receive lower-cost HIV/AIDS medicine, as well as the foundation’s
controversies.
But what about Obama’s statement that Trump’s foundation "took money
other people gave to his charity and then bought a six-foot-tall
painting of himself"?
The White House confirmed that the statement stems from a widely read
Washington Post story
by reporter David Fahrenthold, who’s written a series of stories
about Trump Foundation and has inquired with organizations around the
country to see if they actually received money from the real estate
mogul.
Fahrenthold provided new details of his investigations in a Sept. 10, 2016,
Post article headlined, "How Donald Trump retooled his charity to spend other people’s money."
Based on a review of 17 years of tax filings by the Donald J. Trump
Foundation and interviews with more than 200 individuals and groups who
were listed as recipients of its gifts, Fahrenthold found that "nearly
all" of its money in recent years has come from people other than Trump,
with his most recent personal gift to the foundation’s coffers dating
from 2008.
Experts told Fahrenthold that such an arrangement "is almost unheard of for a family foundation."
The story by Fahrenthold includes the anecdote referenced by Obama in
Philadelphia, which Fahrenthold wrote was one of two cases he found in
which Trump used his money from the charity to "buy himself a gift." By
doing so, he wrote, the foundation appeared to be flouting IRS rules by
buying items that only seemed to be for Trump’s benefit.
"In 2007, for instance, Trump and his wife,
Melania, attended a benefit for a children’s charity held at Mar-a-Lago.
The night’s entertainment was Michael Israel, who bills himself as ‘the
original speed painter.’ His frenetic act involved painting giant
portraits in five to seven minutes — then auctioning off the art he’d
just created.
"He painted Trump.
"Melania Trump bid $10,000.
"Nobody tried to outbid her.
" ‘The auctioneer was just pretty bold, so
he said, "You know what just happened: When you started bidding,
nobody’s going to bid against you, and I think it’s only fair that you
double the bid," ' Israel said in an interview last week.
"Melania Trump increased her bid to $20,000.
" ‘I understand it went to one of his golf courses,’ Israel said of the painting.
"The Trump Foundation paid the $20,000, according to the charity that held the benefit."
Fahrenthold’s article notes that the
Post submitted detailed
questions to the campaign but officials declined to comment. The
campaign did not respond to an inquiry from PolitiFact for this article.
We asked Fahrenthold whether Obama’s version jibed with his reporting.
"It seems pretty accurate to me," Fahrenthold told PolitiFact. "I
talked to both the charity that held the auction and the artist who made
the painting. They told me Melania Trump had actually been the one
bidding on the painting at the auction, which she won for $20,000 --
half went to charity, half went to the artist. But the actual check came
from the Trump Foundation, of which Donald is president and Melania is
not an officer of any kind."
He added that the auction seems to have been held in 2006 but the
check wasn’t cut until 2007, a year in which "almost all of the money in
the Trump Foundation was other people’s money."
Specifically, according to Fahrenthold’s reporting, the Trump
Foundation began that year with $4,238 in the bank. Trump himself gave
$35,000 to the foundation that year. But other donors gave $4.055
million, primarily a single $4 million gift from Vince and Linda
McMahon, the founders of the WWE wrestling empire.
Using the most generous calculation, Fahrenthold said, Trump’s own
money accounted for less than 1 percent of the total amount that entered
the foundation that year, $4,094,238.
"So it was almost all other people’s money," he said.
So where is the painting? That’s a bit more mysterious. Even
crowdsourcing the search through Twitter hasn’t produced a verified
image of the painting.
"I can’t find the damn thing," Fahrenthold said. "It’s out there
somewhere. Neither the painter nor the charity -- the Children's Place
at Home Safe, in Boca Raton, Fla. -- have been able to provide a picture
of it."
Our ruling
Obama said that Trump’s "foundation took money other people gave to
his charity and then bought a six-foot-tall painting of himself."
Fahrenthold verified the anecdote about the painting with the
painter, and his reporting found that, at the time the painting was
auctioned, the vast majority of funds in the foundation’s coffers were
from other people, not Trump. Based on the information available, the
story seems solid.
We rate Obama’s statement True.
0 Komentar untuk "Barack Obama says Trump foundation took other people's money, bought a six-foot-tall painting"