WILL DONALD TRUMP EVER GET VETERANS THE MONEY HE PROMISED THEM?By: Jen Kuznicki | April 18, 2016
So what is going on with the money Donald Trump promised to veterans’ groups?
Trump received mounds of negative press about the disbursement of funds, totaling, according to Trump, about $6 million. As we have learned, a lot of what Trump has to say about nearly everything doesn’t quite sound like what he said previously on the same topic. But looking into what is available so far, less than half of the money raised has been disbursed.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump’s website (donaldtrumpforvets.com) was put together a day before the fundraising rally and was said to have received donations of almost $500,000 the day of the rally, before it was held. Through a mixture of convoluted comments from Trump, a mention of his buddies who would presumably make up the $5 million besides the $1 million Trump pledged, it is understandable that from my research almost no news site has been able to completely figure out how this all pieces together. Here’s my crack at it.
Quite possibly, the biggest problem when doing the math on this subject, is that you have to rely on Trump’s numbers to begin with, because none of this will be disclosed until at least the end of the fiscal year, according to Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, in an expose by The Weekly Standard back in February. The author of the piece, Michael Warren, decided to contact every one of the listed recipients of the monies from the rally and had a partial list of people who responded. One of the things Warren found was that many of the donations given to the veterans’ groups were not directly from the Donald J. Trump Foundation. Puzzled but grateful groups were left to wonder when the check from Trump would arrive after receiving a check from Trump’s buddy, Stewie Rahr.
On April 8, The Daily Mail published a list that was given to them by the Trump campaign, showing almost $3 million in disbursements coming from the Trump Foundation and five of his pals. Using that list and information from an article in the Daily Caller, there is still a shortfall of about $3.5 million (and perhaps a million more, depending on whether the donations on donaldtrumpforvets.com are all smaller donations coming from people outside Trump’s circle of friends).
Additionally, some are under the impression that 22 charities that Trump listed would be getting the $6 million from the Trump Foundation, but instead it seems those who donated in Trump’s circle of friends got to pick from the list of 22 which they would choose to support with their money. But three donations were made, based on information thus far, to groups outside of the 22 Trump listed. The Trump Foundation gave $100,000 each to Achilles International and Americans for Equal Living, and his buddy and fellow real estate developer Richard LeFrak gave all of the money he pledged to the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund. Achilles is not a veterans’ group, but it does have a specialized program for wounded military personnel and veterans. Americans for Equal Living is an extremely new group, organized in June of last year and very little information about what they do is available online.
Here’s what happened to the money that we can track so far:
$1 million by the Stewart J. Rahr Foundation, donated and disbursed to 11 of the listed charities.
$100,000 by the Richard S. and Karen LeFrak Foundation, all to Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund which was not on the list Trump provided.
$1,235,000 by the Donald J. Trump Foundation, donated and disbursed to 12 of the listed charities and two additional charities mentioned earlier.$500,000 by the Carl C. Icahn Foundation to two of the listed charities. It seems that Icahn still has another $500,000 to give out, as he was one of the original $1 million donors.
$100,000 by Howard Lorber and his partner Ben Lebow to two of the charities on the list.
As of a few days ago, as the Daily Mail reports, $2,935,000 has been paid out. But there is still the matter of where the rest of the money went, or rather, whether it will be coming at all.
Another problem with trying to track the money, is that
www.donaldtrumpforvets.com claims it has $1,670,000 in donations from online contributors. This is the same amount of money Trump claimed the website pulled in two weeks after the rally, presumably rounding up to $1.7 million. Here again, we don’t know if the one million Trump donated the day of the rally is included in that figure, nor do we know if a donation of $50,000 by J.J. Carfaro went to that website total. If the figure includes those two donations, we are looking at a disbursement shortage of $3.435 million, and if the website does not reflect Trump and Carfaro’s donations, the shortage is $4.485 million.
At any rate, depending on whether those who donated very large sums of money were allowed to donate from their foundations instead of through Trump’s and were allowed to pick and choose whom they donated to, three people have not followed through in sending out the million dollars each promised — namely, Phil Ruffin, Ike Perlmutter and an anonymous donor. Trump’s foundation still has to disburse at least $435,000, and Carl Icahn has still to pony up and disburse $500,000.
They can still do it, and they probably will, but so far, two and a half months after Trump held the rally, what he said would happen is less than half done.
- See more at:
https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/04/will-donald-trump-ever-get-veterans-the-money-he-promised-them#sthash.epxm9cdh.dpuf
