The Media Has Donald Trump Dead to Rights on a Corruption Charge, But Will It Matter?

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | September 7, 2016 |

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | September 7, 2016 |

Maybe the thing that’s been the most successful so far about Donald Trump’s campaign is that he’s been linked to so many scandals, and has broken the law so many times, that voters have been inoculated to further charges. They don’t care. The media, of course, beats up on Hillary Clinton daily for the appearance of impropriety, but when it comes to Trump, the media seems to have no idea what to do with actual impropriety.

What has been uncovered by Donald Trump’s association with Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, however, has gone from suspicious to shady to downright damning. News broke last week that Donald Trump’s charitable organization donated $25,000 to Pam Bondi’s campaign. As it is illegal for a non-profit to donate money to politicians, the IRS fined him $2,500 for breaking a rule. That got people asking why Trump’s charitable organization was even donating money to Bondi in the first place. As it turns out, the Florida AG was considering a fraud investigation into Trump University, an investigation the Florida AG dropped soon after the donation was made.

As Trump stated in the primaries himself, “You know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them, and they are there for me And that’s a broken system.” It may have been Trump who was breaking the system.

It gets even more sketchy because Donald Trump told the press that he never spoke to Bondi about the donation, saying “I never spoke to her, first of all. She’s a fine person, beyond reproach. I never even spoke to her about it at all. She’s a fine person. Never spoken to her about it, never.” That doesn’t square, however, with Bondi’s own statement, where she said that she personally reached out to ask Trump for the donation “several weeks” before she dropped the fraud investigation.

Nothing suspicious about that, huh?

Well, it gets more suspicious, because — according to HuffPo — not only did Trump donate $25,000 to Bondi’s campaign, but his daughter — a Democrat — gave $500 to Bondi, and both Ivanka and Trump gave $125,000 to the state Republican party (where Bondi gets most of her campaign funds).

Want more? There’s more! Trump provided his Mar-a-Lago estate for Bondi to use for a fundraiser, charging her less than $5,000 for the use. Meanwhile, he charges his own campaign $140,000 for its use. Either he’s trading favors with Bondi, or he’s bilking his own campaign, or both.

This is not a “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” situation. This is a “there’s a fucking three-alarm fire burning down the man’s mansion” situation. Will it matter? Probably not. I mean, even Huffpo frames this as an issue that “could complicate a line of attack his campaign is currently making against Hillary Clinton” rather than what it is: Flagrant political corruption.