Florida AG says she doesn't regret accepting campaign money during NY probe of Trump University
Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday said she doesn’t regret taking a $25,000 campaign contribution from Donald Trump when her counterpart in New York was investigating Trump University and her own office was receiving complaints about similar practices, the Associated Press reports.
And she had no regrets about keeping the donation for her re-election campaign, even after New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sued Trump University.
“If I had returned it, you would have reported ‘Bondi accepted a bribe, got caught and returned it,’” Bondi told the AP. “That’s how the reporting goes. And so, no, there was nothing improper about it. So there was no reason to return it.”
Bondi says she asked Trump for the donation because he was on a list of “friends and family” for such requests, and that the $25,000 wasn’t much considering that millions of dollars were raised. She said her office never launched an investigation and at the time was “reviewing” the New York AG’s lawsuit against Trump.
Former students claim that Trump University—which consisted of seminars typically given in hotel ballrooms—used high-pressure sales tactics and deceptive claims to bilk them tens of thousands of dollars for the get-rich programs, the Washington Post reported.
Trump University has been sued in two class actions in federal courts in California, as well as by New York’s attorney general, the New York Times reported.
The issue of Trump’s $25,000 donation to Bondi’s campaign in 2013 was revived recently after reports that Trump’s campaign paid a $2,500 fine to the IRS for having moved the funds from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a charitable venture that is prohibited from giving money to political groups.
Classes by Trump University and the Florida-based Trump Institute had stopped in Florida by the time Bondi became attorney general as a Republican in 2011, but her office received more than 20 complaints from former students alleging a scam.
Emails show that that at the time Bondi received the funds top officials in her office were being asked by reporters in Florida about the New York attorney general’s lawsuit against Trump University.
Her office said at the time that it was “reviewing” the lawsuit, and nothing came of it. Bondi said today her office receives tens of thousands of complaints each year.
“There was never an investigation into Donald Trump by this office,” Bondi said, adding that “we raise millions of dollars, that’s 25,000 in the whole scheme of a campaign.”
Bondi said that when she learned earlier this year that Trump had paid the money out of his charitable foundation, she returned it but then the Trump Foundation gave it back to her, telling Bondi’s accountant that Trump himself had reimbursed the money with personal funds.
But that hasn’t ended questions about the use of Trump Foundation money. Today the Washington Post, which broke the story earlier this month about the $2,500 IRS fine for Trump’s contribution to Bondi, reports that $258,000 from the charity went to settle lawsuits involving Trump’s for-profit businesses. It also raised questions about possible self-dealing, which would violate laws against nonprofit leaders from using charity funds to benefit themselves or their businesses.
