A Tale of Two Foundations

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 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").

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.

He doesn't give all the money to charity, mind you. He famously bought a six-foot painting of himself and a football autographed by Tim Tebow. And – more to the point for someone who claims expertise in the corrupting ways of modern politics – the foundation gave an especially well-timed $25,000 contribution to a political group connected to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (who had solicited the donation from Trump) when her office was reviewing a case the New York attorney general had brought against the risible Trump University – an investigation the office subsequently elected not to pursue. Not for nothing, a charitable foundation like Trump's can't make political contributions (he's paid a penalty to the IRS over the matter), and team Trump claims that the check coming from there rather than his personal account was the result of a clerical mix-up.

But it was fortuitous error, opening a window into the kind of pay-for-play politics that Trump has bragged about mastering. ("When you give," he has said, "they do whatever the hell you want them to do.") That's why the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee this week called on the Department of Justice to investigate the Trump Foundation and why the (Democratic) attorney general of New York has opened his own investigation into the entity.

None of this should surprise. It's utterly in keeping with the carnival of cons that Trump has run over the years. He's built a seedy empire which trades on his name-as-brand to make money. Sometimes it means playing philanthropist with other people's money. Sometimes it means monetizing the hopes and dreams of hard-working dupes through schemes like Trump University.

And sometimes it means licensing himself out to a dizzying panoply of foreign entities, a series of arrangements brought to light by Newsweek's Kurt Eichenwald. His deep dive into the extent Trump and his company are economically enmeshed with "global financiers, foreign politicians and even criminals" lead him to conclude that the Republican nominee could be "the most conflicted president in American history, one whose business interests will constantly jeopardize the security of the United States." In short, might a foreign power treat their local Trump business interests differently knowing that they would be lining the U.S. president's pocket? And might the famously thin-skinned businessman's policy decisions be affected by how countries handle his dealings?

Compare and contrast all of this with the much-maligned Clinton Foundation. Let's be clear: Whatever you think of the Clintons, their foundation has been a force for good. The signature example: Nearly 12 million people around the world have more affordable access to AIDS/HIV medication at least in part because of the organization. (See Colby political scientist Laura Seay's tweet-storm on the topic for a ground-level view of the foundation's work.) And it does a lot more – Inside Philanthropy's David Callahan has a good explainer here cataloging the foundations causes. (And contra right-wing talking points, 89 percent of its expenditures go to charity.)

Oh yeah: And the Clintons don't make money from the foundation (again a point of regular GOP mendacity). On its face, then, allegations that the foundation is some sort of pay-for-play, money-making scheme for the Clintons are genuinely the stuff of farce. It sounds like the plot of a slapstick caper movie: Prominent public figures offer access in exchange for ... large donations to worthy causes. Be real: He's a former president and she's a former secretary of state; they will never want for pecuniary opportunities (some arguably distasteful) or chances to hobnob with the global elite. But the Clinton Foundation isn't one of them.

The foundation is not without blemishes. Like many charities some of the money it raises comes from unsavory sources. But as Slate's Mark Joseph Stern observed last month, "If American charities did not take money from some very bad people, there would be remarkably few American charities operating at all."

And by the same token the relationship between the foundation and Clinton's State Department bears scrutiny but thus far the major revelations have been "optics" and "narrative"-driven smoke not substantive fire: The big AP story about the number of times she met with people who had donated to the foundation was laughably oversold and the batch of emails released last month between the foundation and Clinton's staff failed to demonstrate special treatment for the organization's friends.

I'll give the last word to President Barack Obama, who neatly summed up the absurdity of Trump casting foundation-related stones: "You want to debate foundations and charities?" Obama said Tuesday. "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."