Uncle Sam to Donald Trump: Please explain these shady practices and dubious donations
FEC presses Trump on a range of potential campaign finance violations, including suspected illegal donations
SIMON MALOY
The Federal Election Commission is on Donald Trump’s case over a slew of potential campaign finance violations. The agency sent the campaign a sternly worded letter regarding its final disclosure of the election season, detailing some 240 pages worth of donations that may violate the law. It includes individual donors who gave in excess of the legal limit, large donations from anonymous sources and donations from entities that may be barred from making political contributions of any kind.
In the broader universe of financial irregularities surrounding our president-elect, this represents relatively small beer. And letters of this type are fairly routine — presidential candidates often have donors who give in excess of the legal contribution limits, and it’s difficult for the campaigns to catch every instance in a timely fashion. Trump’s situation, however, is unusual in a couple of ways.
First, as OpenSecrets reports, the Trump campaign had a bizarre system for accounting for excessive donations and the resulting refunds. Instead of just sending the excess money back and deducting it from their totals, the campaign would count the entire donation toward their fundraising totals and make notations of how much of each unlawful donation would be refunded at a later date.
This happened over and over, artificially bloating Trump’s fundraising totals and making it extremely difficult to figure out by how much. “It’s impossible to determine the amount by which Trump’s totals were inflated without going through every report and doing the math,” OpenSecrets notes.
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http://www.salon.com/2017/01/14/uncle-sam-to-donald-trump-please-explain-these-shady-practices-and-dubious-donations/
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