New York AG Calls The Trump Foundation A Shell Corporation

Donald, Melania, Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric Trump, on the campaign trail. Good Morning America interview.

New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood labeled the Trump Foundation a “shell corporation,” in court documents filed Thursday. 

The memo was issued in response to a dismissal motion that was filed against the lawsuit that was brought in June against the Trump Foundation. 

As the News Blender reported at the time, the New York attorney generals office, sued President Trump, along with his three children, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr, and Eric Trump, asking the court to dissolve the Foundation, ban each member from serving as a board member or a trustee of another non-profit organization for up to ten years in the case of President Trump, and demanded they return the $2.8 million collected in 2016 at a political fundraiser in Iowa.

In the memo filed Thursday, Underwood explains that the Foundation, “was a shell corporation that functioned as a checkbook from which the business entity known as the Trump Organization made payments- using other people’s money,” for the benefit of President Trump. President Trump has not personally contributed to the Foundation since 2008. 

In the 45 page memo Underwood lists several occasions in which she alleges that President Trump used the Foundations money to benefit personally, for example in 2013 she explains, “the Foundation paid $5,000 to the DC Preservation League, a charity that played a role in the conversion of the historic Old Post Office in Washington D.C. into what is now the Trump International Hotel. The $5,000 was used to place an advertisement in the ·program for DC Preservation League’s annual gala, not for the Trump Foundation, but for a Trump business, this time the Trump Hotel Collection.” 

President Trump in June used Twitter to dismiss the case as political motivated. 

President Trump’s attorney, Alan Futerfas, according to Courthouse News Service, wrote in his August motion to dismiss, similar sentiments as the President in which Futerfas questioned the motivation of the prosecutor, “This case involves the unprecedented circumstance of a state agency suing a charitable Foundation that, since its inception in 1987, has raised $17.5 million dollars and, upon dissolution, will have given over $19 million to charitable causes,” he added, “The NYAG, as an entity, has issued scores of press releases trumpeting its fight against the president as evidence of its reason d’etre and its success as an agency.”    

In her filed memo with the court Underwood defends the lawsuit, writing it was not bias, but because of the illegality in which the Charity operated that prompted the lawsuit after a two year investigation. She also explains that the quote used to show political bias, “she considers her battles with the President ‘the most important work [she] has ever done,” has been misquoted, her original quote which appears in a footnote on page 34 reads, “I’ve served in many roles in government throughout my career. But I believe this job,”-meaning the job of Attorney General-“at this moment in history, is the most important job I have ever had.” 

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Member of the Free Press who is politically homeless and a political junkie.

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