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Numbers Disagree With Trump Golf Course Claim Of 'Millions To Charity'
Retweeted by Peter Overby: https://twitter.com/peteroverby
Wow! Great work, @NPR!
Link to tweet
Trump golf club claims big donations to pediatric cancer charities and veterans groups who never received the money
Link to tweet
Numbers Disagree With Trump Golf Course Claim Of 'Millions To Charity'
October 18, 20175:00 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
TOM DREISBACH
https://twitter.com/tomdreisbach
NPR's "Embedded" podcast team examined charitable giving by Trump National Golf Club, Los Angeles. It found the organization appears to have fallen short of its bold claims of philanthropic giving.
Transcript
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
President Trump has made some bold claims about his charitable giving over the years, and those claims do not always match up with reality. At Donald Trump's California golf course, NPR has found that the golf club has exaggerated or misstated its philanthropic giving in several ways. And after we started asking questions, the golf club took down their claims of philanthropy from their website. Tom Dreisbach is a producer for the NPR podcast Embedded. He's been looking into this and joins me now. Hey there, Tom.
....
DREISBACH: So this is Trump National Golf Club, Los Angeles. It's actually just outside the city of LA. It's an amazing property that Trump has owned since about 2002, and on their website, they claimed that they had given approximately $5 million to a variety of charitable causes, and they listed about 200 organizations that they said they had given money to.
GREENE: And what did you find was the truth?
DREISBACH: So we examined this list that was on the website. We cross-referenced that with a publicly available document that the Trump campaign had put out where they essentially just listed out all of their donations over the years, and that included some donations from the golf club. But when we looked at the golf club's website, they included some organizations that weren't on that document. So that got us to look a little bit closer.
We started contacting those organizations, emailing, making phone calls. And what we found very quickly is that a number of them - about 17 in total - said they had received no donations at all or at least had no record of such a donation. That included the California Department of Veterans Affairs. It included the Alisa Ann Ruch Burn Foundation, which supports children who have suffered severe burns. And then the donations we could verify were almost entirely in-kind donations for a round of golf or a gift certificate for a Sunday brunch for two.
October 18, 20175:00 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
TOM DREISBACH
https://twitter.com/tomdreisbach
NPR's "Embedded" podcast team examined charitable giving by Trump National Golf Club, Los Angeles. It found the organization appears to have fallen short of its bold claims of philanthropic giving.
Transcript
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
President Trump has made some bold claims about his charitable giving over the years, and those claims do not always match up with reality. At Donald Trump's California golf course, NPR has found that the golf club has exaggerated or misstated its philanthropic giving in several ways. And after we started asking questions, the golf club took down their claims of philanthropy from their website. Tom Dreisbach is a producer for the NPR podcast Embedded. He's been looking into this and joins me now. Hey there, Tom.
....
DREISBACH: So this is Trump National Golf Club, Los Angeles. It's actually just outside the city of LA. It's an amazing property that Trump has owned since about 2002, and on their website, they claimed that they had given approximately $5 million to a variety of charitable causes, and they listed about 200 organizations that they said they had given money to.
GREENE: And what did you find was the truth?
DREISBACH: So we examined this list that was on the website. We cross-referenced that with a publicly available document that the Trump campaign had put out where they essentially just listed out all of their donations over the years, and that included some donations from the golf club. But when we looked at the golf club's website, they included some organizations that weren't on that document. So that got us to look a little bit closer.
We started contacting those organizations, emailing, making phone calls. And what we found very quickly is that a number of them - about 17 in total - said they had received no donations at all or at least had no record of such a donation. That included the California Department of Veterans Affairs. It included the Alisa Ann Ruch Burn Foundation, which supports children who have suffered severe burns. And then the donations we could verify were almost entirely in-kind donations for a round of golf or a gift certificate for a Sunday brunch for two.
