As Slate’s Josh Voorhees explained Tuesday, Donald Trump is taking renewed (and deserved) heat for having had his Trump Foundation charity give $25,000 to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi in 2013 shortly before she decided not to launch a fraud investigation of his apparently quite fraud-tastic Trump University program. Trump claims that the timing of the donation was purely a coincidence, which is a pretty rich suggestion from a guy who talks all the time about how much influence his money used to buy him with politicians. (And, of course, the whole thing is ironic in light of Trump’s claim that Hillary Clinton shouldn’t be president because she did favors for Clinton Foundation donors while she was secretary of state.)
Anyway, the Huffington Post has discovered that the $25,000 donation wasn’t even the only act of generosity that Trump extended Bondi’s way: In March 2014, his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach hosted a fundraiser for her. He even gave her a great deal on the rental:
Space at the resort is expensive to rent, and Trump has charged his own presidential campaign roughly $140,000 per event for use of the mansion.
In contrast, the Republican Party of Florida paid only $4,855.65 for the Bondi fundraiser, cutting a check on March 25, 2014.
In combining a sketchy business endeavor, comically open hypocrisy in re: Hillary Clinton, and the suggestion that he might be indirectly overcharging his campaign donors, this story is a pretty strong 9 out of 10 on the Trump Scale. The only thing that’s missing is someone retweeting a white supremacist, but let’s give it time.
