The Clinton Foundation, the global charity set up by former President Bill Clinton, has caused some headaches for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, and Donald Trump says he will tell everyone about it in a major speech. But it turns out that several ethics and campaign law watchdogs are also calling for an investigation of Trump's family foundation, The Daily Beast reports, with groups including the Sunlight Foundation, Citizens for Responsibility in Ethics in Washington (CREW), the Campaign Legal Center, and Public Citizen accusing Trump of using the Trump Foundation as a political slush fund.
One of the red flags was Trump, listed as president of the foundation (children Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Trump Jr. are directors), handing out Trump Foundation checks to veterans groups at campaign rallies earlier this year. "A 501(c)(3), like the Trump Foundation, is strictly prohibited from engaging in political activity," said CREW spokesman Jordan Libowitz. Trump used his foundation to handle donations he raised during an event to protest a Fox News presidential debate he'd bowed out of, and the veteran charities were at Trump's campaign rallies to pick up the Trump Foundation checks. "It raises serious questions when you make a charity part of your campaign event," says Larry Noble, general counsel at the Campaign Legal Center. "It could create legal problems for both the campaign and the charity.”
The biggest potential problem for Trump and his charity is a $25,000 donation the foundation — which appears to have no dedicated staff — sent to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi shortly before she dropped interest in a fraud lawsuit against Trump University. CREW has filed a complaint with the IRS about that donation; Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks called it a mistake and blamed the failure to report the donation on a "series of unfortunate coincidences and errors." Philip Hackney, a former IRS chief counsel, told The Daily Beast that the Bondi donation itself is enough to launch an investigation, but says he doesn't think the IRS will touch it. "I think it's dangerous, particularly politically for them right now, to audit in this realm," he said. "That bothers me, given what I see in this particular case, but I don't know that the IRS has another choice in some ways." You can read more at The Daily Beast. Peter Weber
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is apparently turning his focus to civility.
Christie is launching a new non-profit institute called the Christie Institute of Public Policy with the goal of bringing civility to modern politics, NJ Advance Media reports, with Christie telling the outlet that "unfortunately our politics have gotten so ugly and divisive in the country that people are not having civilized conversations." This institute is to include a series of lectures, the first of which will be with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D).
The former New Jersey governor might seem like an odd carrier of that message to some, with his tenure having been characterized by combative exchanges like when he famously scolded a protester by shouting, "sit down and shut up!" Still, Christie argued to NJ Advance Media that the institute is just a logical extension of his record of working across the aisle with Democrats, including Cuomo. "That's what my governorship was really about," he said.
Christie went on to criticize "a lot of Democrat friends who are using a lot of language that is very hot." He definitively stated "no" when asked if this could serve as a springboard into another presidential campaign, although he has previously teased the possibility of running in 2024, asking in February, "Why not?" If he does wind up in another potentially brutal Republican primary, we'll see how long this newfound love of civility lasts. Brendan Morrow
The director of The Hunt is speaking out after a firestorm led to the film's cancellation, making the case that the whole thing was a big misunderstanding.
Craig Zobel, who directed the political satire that Universal Pictures recently pulled from its September release, told Variety on Monday that the intent of his movie "was to poke at both sides of the aisle equally" and not to "enrage and divide."
Universal pulled advertising for The Hunt in the wake of two deadly mass shootings, but further criticism of the film emerged after a report that its plot revolved around liberal elites hunting "deplorables" for sport. Multiple Fox News segments blasted the movie, and President Trump himself weighed in, tweeting about "the movie coming out" that he said was "made in order to inflame and cause chaos." While Trump didn't name the film, it can be assumed he was talking about The Hunt. Not quite taken into account was the fact that the movie's trailer suggested the "deplorables" were the heroes of the film, something Variety reports is clear in an early draft of the script.
Zobel told Variety he does not believe the film "could incite violence" and that it "satirized this moment in our culture — where we jump to assume we know someone's beliefs because of which 'team' we think they're on ... and then start shouting at them." He also criticized "inaccurate assumptions about the content and intent of the movie" but said that he "supported" the studio's decision to pull it once these assumptions "began to take hold." Now, Zobel says he hopes everyone will "reflect on why we are in this moment, where we don’t have any desire to listen to each other."
It remains unclear whether The Hunt could be released at a later date, but Zobel hopes it can be, and producer Jason Blum told Vulture there is "definitely a chance" of it still coming out.
Voters are finding it ever more likely that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has a good shot at unseating President Trump if she wins the Democratic nomination, a new Economist/YouGov poll shows.
Former Vice President Joe Biden has been running on the notion that he'd be able to swing middle-of-the-road voters in middle-of-the-road states back to the blue side after their dalliance with the GOP in 2016, making him the candidate with the best "electability" claim. But Warren is gaining on him. A healthy 65 percent of Democratic voters polled still said that Biden would "probably beat Donald Trump" in the general election, while Warren received the second highest mark in that area, with 57 percent.
Sure, those eight percentage points don't make for an insignificant gap, but Warren has vaulted 14 points since a previous poll in June, while Biden's figure has stagnated. And the two actually drew even closer among those who say each candidate would "probably lose" to Trump, with 16 percent of Democratic voters feeling pessimistic about Biden's chances and 18 percent for Warren.
Faiz Shakir, the campaign manager for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), said that Biden's case "rests on some weak assumptions," anyway. "You have to excite people about where you want to take this country," he said. Bloomberg notes that candidates like Sanders and Warren, for example, are focused more on bringing in new votes from people who sat out the 2016 election because of disenchantment, in contrast to Biden's determination to flip voters. That said, Biden still has more than his fair share of believers.
"We can't take a chance, and Joe Biden is our best chance," Henry Singleton, a New Yorker who watched the major Democratic candidates make their pitch to black voters at the NAACP convention in Detroit last month, told Bloomberg.
The Economist/YouGov poll was conducted between August 10-13 through web-based interviews with 1,500 U.S. adult citizens. The margin of error was 3 percentage points. Tim O'Donnell
One of President Trump's oldest and closest friends is on the outs with the commander-in-chief, Politico reports.
Tom Barrack, a wealthy investor, has been by the president's side since the late 1980s, and that remained the case early on in Trump's tenure in the Oval Office when Barrack served as the chair of Trump's 2017 inauguration fund.
Now, though, the two reportedly no longer speak, current and former White House officials say. The falling out reportedly has something to do with Barrack's role in the inauguration, which is under investigation by prosecutors. The U.S. attorney's office in Brooklyn is investigating whether Barrack violated laws requiring lobbyists to register when they work for foreign interests. The prosecutors have placed a particular emphasis on whether the inauguration let foreigners from the Middle East use straw donors to donate to the inauguration.
"The last thing Trump needs is to be closely associated with one more person facing scrutiny and potential ethical issues," said a person who knows Barrack.
However, other sources told Politico that the fracturing of their friendship began before the inauguration fund and is actually a result of something much simpler. A former White House official said that Barrack "is the kind of guy who would tell" Trump "things he didn't want to hear, so Trump stopped talking to him." Another source close to Trump said the president just "got tired" of Barrack, who he felt was trying to involve himself too much in the administration.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for Barrack said that the relationship between the two "remains unchanged." But whatever the case may be, Politico notes the old pals could rekindle their friendship at any moment, as the president as been known to "turn on friends and allies, only to bring them back into the fold months or years later." Read more at Politico. Tim O'Donnell