When Donald Trump boasted in an interview aired on Sunday that he “made a lot of money” in a 2009 deal to rent a New York-area estate to Libya's then-dictator, Muammar Qadhafi, he did not specify what he did with that money.

But back in 2011, when pressed on the matter, Trump assured a reporter that the money had all gone to charity, a claim that POLITICO has been unable to verify and that his campaign is unwilling to confirm. The episode adds to a series of unverified or exaggerated claims of charitable giving that have been dogging the presumptive Republican nominee.


Last week, Trump excoriated reporters for scrutinizing his claims of charitable giving to veterans groups, made during a much-hyped fundraiser he held on the eve of the Iowa caucuses. Trump raised less than the $6 million figure he originally claimed, and much of the giving came only after he received inquiries from reporters.

Trump’s past pledges that the proceeds of his ill-fated vodka line, Trump Vodka, and of his 2015 campaign book, “Crippled America,” would go to charity are now also coming under scrutiny because of a lack of evidence that he followed through on them. Trump’s spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, did not respond to questions seeking confirmation that the proceeds of those ventures did, in fact, benefit charities, as Trump said they would.

Hicks also did not address repeated questions about whether Trump actually donated the proceeds of the Qadhafi rental to charity.

Trump made the deal with Qadhafi’s representatives in September 2009, renting them his 230-acre estate in Westchester County, New York, after other potential landlords had turned them down because of Qhadafi’s role as sponsor of the 1988 terrorist bombing of the New York-bound Pam Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which claimed 189 American lives.

The Libyan strongman intended to stay on the estate’s grounds in his Bedouin-style tent during a United Nations General Assembly meeting, but local authorities ordered the tent taken down.

"I said, when I did it, ‘I’m going to take Qadhafi’s money. I’m not going make it easy on him, and I’m going to give the money to charity.’ And that's exactly what I did,” Trump told CNN’s Poppy Harlow in 2011, when asked about his profits from the deal.

But tax records from the businessman’s charitable conduit, the Donald J. Trump Foundation, show he made no contributions to it in 2009 or any of the next five years, from 2010 through 2014.

Asked about the lack of contributions to his foundation, Hicks emailed: “Mr. Trump most often makes charitable contributions personally and not through his foundation.”

A list of Trump’s “charitable contributions” generated by his campaign that dates back to the beginning of 2010 includes conservation easements claimed for tax breaks, free rounds of golf, and donations of other people’s money made through his foundation, but no money contributed out of Trump’s own pocket, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Trump would have had to have received payment and passed it along to charity between late September of 2009 — when Qadhafi rented the property — and January of 2010, when the campaign’s list begins. Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns — a repudiation of decades of tradition for major party nominees — adds to the difficulty of verifying his various claims of charitable giving.

Before cutting the deal with Trump, Qadhafi’s representatives had approached New York City realtor Jason Haber about renting an Upper East Side townhouse for the dictator’s use during the UN meeting. Those negotiations ended when Haber said he would only rent the property to Qadhafi if Libya extradited one of the Lockerbie bombers, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, to Scotland to serve out a life sentence.

This week, Haber expressed outrage at the Trump campaign’s failure to account for his charity claim.

“The families who lost relatives on Pan Am flight 103 deserve to know where the money went to,” he said. “If you’re going to take blood money you better put it to good use, and at the very least, at the very, very least, that money should be given to a charity.”

It’s not clear exactly how much money Trump made from the rental of the Westchester estate, which the New York billionaire bought for $7.5 million in 1996. In 2011, the businessman told Fox News, “[Qadhafi] paid me more for one night than the land was worth for the whole year, or for two years, and then I didn't let him use the land." (In fact, the town of Bedford, New York, not Trump, ordered the dictator’s tent be taken down.)

Haber said that it was clear from his dealings with Qadhafi’s representatives that before he made his extradition demand they would have been willing to pay well into six figures for use of the townhouse he had on offer.

Trump has repeatedly boasted of profiting off of the rental to Qadhafi without indicating that the money went to charity. “I made a lot of money with Qadhafi, if you remember," the businessman told CBS’s John Dickerson in an interview aired on Sunday, adding, "He paid me a fortune, never got to stay there, and it became sort of a big joke."

But in the CNN interview in 2011, when Harlow pressed him to account for where the money went, Trump said it went to charity.

“Do you still have the money that Qadhafi paid you?” Harlow asked.

“You’re not talking that kind of money — do I still have it? What does that mean?” Trump responded.

“I mean what happened to the money? Some celebrities who have performed for Qadhafi have given that money away to charity or given it away, I think that’s the question on people’s minds,” Harlow told him.

“I give tremendous, in fact, the other night, Comedy Central roasted me. They gave me a tremendous amount of money. It’s already gone to charity. So, I give money to charity. I gave that money to charity.” He added, “And in fact, I said, when I did it, ‘I’m going to take Qadhafi’s money. I’m not going to make it easy on him, and I’m going to give the money to charity.’ And that’s exactly what I did.”

Trump did not limit his dealings with the Libyan regime to the property rental. On Tuesday, Buzzfeed published a report that Trump sought a face-to-face meeting with Qadhafi in 2009 and courted the dictator’s ambassador in the United States in a bid to earn business in Libya.

The 2009 rental and Trump’s attempts to justify it still rankle Rabbi Stephanie Bernstein of Bethesda, Maryland, the widow of a Justice Department special agent who died aboard Pan AM 103.

“It shows that what’s most important to him is making money,” she told POLITICO. “He doesn’t care about the morality involved here.”