A new tax filing shows that Eric Trump’s charity golf tournaments did in fact pay tens of thousands of dollars to Trump properties, despite Eric Trump’s earlier assertions that much of the group’s expenses were written off by his father’s businesses, the Daily Beast and Forbes reported late last week.
Eric Trump’s former foundation — from which he resigned as a board member last year, when it also changed its name from the Eric Trump Foundation to Curetivity — donated slightly more than $3 million to charitable causes in 2016, according to its filing.
The filing also shows that the foundation paid tens of thousands of dollars to Trump Organization properties for goods and services provided during charity golf tournaments and dinner events, including $98,730 to the Trump National Golf Course in Westchester, New York for the foundation’s annual golf fundraiser. The filing consistently claims the payments were for well less than the value of the goods and services provided. In sum, the two publications counted, Eric Trump’s foundation paid his father’s private businesses roughly $145,000 in 2016.
Trump seemed to respond to the reporting Monday:
I will be always be incredibly proud of my work for @StJude, raising $16.3+ million dollars over the last 10 years at a 9.2% expense ratio. Their research continues to save millions of lives worldwide and they are truly the greatest peripatetic research hospital in the world. pic.twitter.com/M08q6N2zQ3
— Eric Trump (@EricTrump) January 15, 2018
In June of last year, Forbes reported on a series of conflicts of interest facing Eric Trump’s foundation, including board members who were reliant on the Trump Organization for much or all of their livelihoods, that the foundation re-donated money to other charities who in turn hosted fundraisers at Trump properties, and that the overhead expenses for charity events hosted by the organization spiked well into the hundreds of thousands annually beginning in 2011, reportedly at Donald Trump’s command.
The Daily Beast reported in September, based on tax records and financial disclosures, that between 2007 and 2014, the foundation “spent $881,779 on its annual Golf Invitational at Trump-owned clubs, a portion of which—$100,000 in 2013 and $88,000 in 2014—was reported as paid directly ‘to a company of a family member of the Board of Directors.’ In other words, Donald Trump himself.”
“We get to use our assets 100% free of charge,” Eric Trump incorrectly told Forbes last year, the outlet noted Friday.
One former employee each of the Eric Trump Foundation and Trump National Westchester told Forbes in June that Trump had insisted on his son’s foundation paying for the events.
“Mr. Trump had a cow,” Ian Gillule, Trump National Westchester’s former membership and marketing director, told Forbes, describing the elder Trump’s reaction to the written off expenses.
“He flipped,” Gillule continued. “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.'”
The report spurred New York’s attorney general, Eric Schniederman, to announce a probe into the foundation, one his office told the Daily Beast was “ongoing.”
Also revealed in the new filing: Curetivity’s new board members, who include White House Director of Social Media Dan Scavino and Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, who the Wall Street Journal recently reported paid hush money to an adult film actor a month before the 2016 election over her reported sexual encounter with the elder Trump.