Based on newly public tax filings, president-elect Donald Trump's non-profit Trump Foundation committed illegal self-dealing in the 2015 fiscal year. According to the Washington Post, who broke the story on Tuesday, the Trump Foundation filled out tax forms that noted Foundation had transferred "income or assets to a disqualified person," a violation of private foundation tax regulations.
The Washington Post reported in September that Trump had used more than quarter of a million dollars in his charity's funds to settle legal disputes and to purchase self-portraits at charity fundraisers. The tax forms, which were recently made public by GuideStar, a website that tracks not-for-profits, confirm the Trump Foundation not only gave income or assets to a "disqualified person," (which the Post reports could be Trump, his family, etc.), but also checked "yes" for a question that asked if the Foundation had done any self-dealing in previous years.
In the story published Tuesday, the Post reports there was insufficient information in the tax forms to confirm whether or not the more than $250,000 of Trump Foundation money used for Trump's legal dealings are accounted for in the 2015 forms.
In addition to an admission of self-dealing, the tax forms also revealed that Trump began giving to more conservative causes during his presidential campaign, according to the Post. Trump wrote a $10,000 Foundation check to Project Veritas, a conservative group that is famous for filming "sting" operations against Democrats and progressive organizations.
Project Veritas released four videos that purported to show Democrats committing large-scale voter fraud, a line of thinking heavily touted by Donald Trump who called for volunteers to monitor the polls on election day and repeatedly claimed the election was "rigged" against him. The fact-checking website Snopes says that the videos were all heavily-edited and the claims impossible to verify without access to the full video clips.
