QOTD: that nice Republican fellow with the glasses
by digby
I'm talking about Hugh Hewitt, of course, who is now an unreconstructed Trump supporter and yet is still treated as if he's some sort of sane moderate Republican. Here he is on MSNBC this morning talking about the bombshell Trump Foundation story that shows he spent a quarter of a million dollars of the charity's money for his own personal legal expenses:
There might be someone out there on the margin who moves now on a foundation story. If so there are just as many who will move because of Gilbert Chagoury and the Clinton Foundation and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the Foreign Agents Registration act. I'm not sure the Clintons want to be stressing foundation stories.
This is yet another case of the Trump people turning the story back on Clinton so that whenever he takes a hit, she gets hit too. And the media has well prepared the ground for this by pounding on emails, foundation and Benghazi until people just assume there must be something nefarious and criminal even though there isn't. ("Lock her up!!!")
If you haven't heart about the Chagoury story, if you google you will find page after page of febrile wingnuttery before you get to one where you find out that he is a foundation donor who asked to be put in touch with someone in the State department and they didn't do it. The press has been eagerly publishing whatever juicy "smell test" tid-bits Judicial Watch spoon feeds them and this is one of the stories that's "out there." It's nonsense.
Trump, on the other hand is being shown to have literally used his charity to pay off politicians (there's a signed check with his name on it) and pay for his personal legal fees with the money from people who thought they were donating to charitable causes. That's on top of his buying pictures of himself and accepting awards for his "philanthropy" when he hasn't spent a penny of his own money for almost a decade.
Trump has called the Clinton Foundation a slush fund but the books are completely open to the public, have been reviewed by accountants and there is no evidence of that at all. The Trump Foundation actually is a slush fund to pay for pay-offs and Trump's personal business related expenses.
#Bothsidesdoit
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