- Florida’s attorney general reportedly courted Trump, seeking campaign cash in 2013
- After Trump’s nonprofit gave her campaign committee $25,000, Attorney General Pam Bondi decided not to pursue Trump University fraud allegations
- Trump has said he donates to politicians, and then they “are there for me.”
- Federal regulations prohibit nonprofits like the Donald J. Trump Foundation from making campaign contributions
Charles Jacobson, a retiree in Delray Florida, asked for help from Florida’s attorney general after he lost $26,000 enrolling in Trump University’s three-day seminar. “I took it because they told us it would make us rich, but it didn’t teach me anything—except my bankruptcy,” he said.
The response from the office of the Florida attorney general? Jacobson should “visit an Internet search engine such as http://www.yahoo.com or http://www. Google.com to search for information on any class action lawsuits you may benefit from.”
The attorney general’s office issued this noncommittal response even though, according to other records, it had received as many as a hundred complaints similar to Jacobson’s over the years about Trump University—and even though New York’s attorney general had responded to similar allegations by filing a massive lawsuit claiming Trump’s illegal college had defrauded around 5,000 people out of more than $40 million.
One possible reason for Attorney General Pam Bondi’s seeming indifference: The Donald J. Trump Foundation gave $25,000 to her campaign committee, And Justice for All, in September 2013, just four days after Bondi’s spokesperson said Florida might join the multi-state case against Trump University.
Reporter Scott Maxwell, who trudged through thousands of pages of records from Bondi’s office, summed up the potential conflict of interest in an Orlando Sentinel column last week: “If you want to try to defend Bondi’s actions, try finishing this sentence for me: ‘I think it is perfectly appropriate for a prosecutor to take big chunks of money from someone she has been asked to investigate because ….’ If you can finish that sentence with a straight face, OK. I can’t. And you know what? I don’t think Pam Bondi can either.”
In 2013, when news of the donation first came to light, Bondi’s spokesman said the New York lawsuit would adequately address the fraud allegations, adding that Bondi was not personally involved in the decision not to prosecute.
The Associated Press now reports that Bondi had been talking to Trump and had directly asked for the donation — and “after the check came in, Bondi’s office nixed suing Trump, citing insufficient grounds to proceed.”
In an emailed statement to Heat Street, Bondi denied these claims, calling the Associated Press’s story “false and misleading.”
“My office has made public every document on this issue, which shows no one in my office ever opened an investigation on Trump University nor was there a basis for doing so,” Bondi wrote. “Any news story that suggests otherwise is completely false. I have spent my career prosecuting criminals and protecting Floridians and will not compromise my dedication to our citizens.”
This March, Bondi was Florida’s first major Republican politician to endorse Trump.
The Donald J. Trump Foundation, which made the $25,000 contribution, is a 501(c)3. The Internal Revenue Code says that all such nonprofits are “absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign,” adding that they cannot contribute money or even make public statements in favor of or against a candidate.
The Trump campaign told the Washington Post in March that the contribution was a clerical error; Trump’s nonprofit had intended to donate to an unrelated nonprofit, Justice for All, a spokesperson said.
The Kansas-based Justice for All told the Post that, as of March 2016, it still had not received any contributions from Trump’s nonprofit. The nonprofit had not responded by deadline to Heat Street‘s query.
As the AP noted, this campaign contribution — mostly a local story at the time — has come back into the public eye after Trump’s bragging that he has used campaign donations to influence politicians.
“I give to everybody,” Trump said in his first debate. “When they call, I give. And you know what, when I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. That’s a broken system.”
Similarly, in January in Iowa, he told a crowd, “I’ve got to give to them, because when I want something, I get it. When I call, they kiss my ass.”
By deadline, the Trump campaign had not responded to Heat Street’s request for comment.
— Jillian Kay Melchior writes for Heat Street and is a fellow for the Steamboat Institute.
