Quid Pro Quo
By Donald Trump had a Foundation. It was a massive grift that did very little actual philanthropic work. He also had a “University,” an outright scam that bilked his fans out tens of millions of dollars. In Florida, he used the former grift to effectively bribe a public official to stop looking into the latter grift. And now, the punchline:
On September 13, 2013, the Florida Attorney General’s office announced that it was considering taking legal action against Trump University, amid allegations that the real-estate investment school had defrauded its student body.
Four days later, Donald Trump’s personal charity (illegally) donated $25,000 to a political group aligned with Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi’s reelection campaign. Shortly thereafter, the Sunshine State’s chief prosecutor decided that there were “insufficient grounds” to proceed with a probe of the mogul’s school.
Last summer, the Associated Press revealed that Bondi had personally solicited a donation from Trump — around the same time that her office was debating whether to pursue an investigation of his university.
[…]
On Thursday — less than two months after Trump won a presidential election on a promise to “drain the swamp” of D.C. corruption — his transition team told Bloomberg that Pam Bondi will take a job in the new White House.
It’s a nice racket! Still, while Donald Trump might have used a phony foundation to pay off a public official to prevent investigation into another large-scale con, donors to Hillary Clinton’s live-saving foundation once requested Huma Abedin for a meeting and didn’t receive one, so fundamentally Both Sides Do It but Clinton is worse.
And while this is a joke, your latest reminder that this was also literally the judgment collectively reached by the American press during the election campaign that put Trump in the White House:
