Today's episode of This Is The Crook You're Voting For?, the new hit sitcom from Washington Post Pulitzer vacuum David Farenthold, is another fine example of the good works done by the Donald J. Trump Foundation. In this case, the good work being done by the donors to the Donald J. Trump Foundation involved keeping Donald J. Trump his own self out from under embarrassing civil judgments.

Those cases, which together used $258,000 from Trump's charity, were among four newly documented expenditures in which Trump may have violated laws against "self-dealing" — which prohibit nonprofit leaders from using charity money to benefit themselves or their businesses. In one case, from 2007, Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club faced $120,000 in unpaid fines from the town of Palm Beach, Fla., resulting from a dispute over the size of a flagpole. In a settlement, Palm Beach agreed to waive those fines — if Trump's club made a $100,000 donation to a specific charity for veterans. Instead, Trump sent a check from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a charity funded almost entirely by other people's money, according to tax records.

But the flagpole is not the best story. Not even close.

In the other case in which a Trump Foundation payment seemed to help settle a legal dispute, the trouble began with a hole-in-one. In 2010, a man named Martin Greenberg hit a hole-in-one on the 13th hole while playing in a charity tournament at Trump's course in Westchester County, N.Y. Greenberg won a $1 million prize. Briefly. Later, Greenberg was told that he had won nothing. The prize's rules required that the shot had to go 150 yards. But Trump's course had allegedly made the hole too short. Greenberg sued. Eventually, court papers show, Trump's golf course signed off on a settlement that required it to make a donation of Greenberg's choosing. Then, on the day that the parties informed the court they had settled their case, a $158,000 donation was sent to the Martin Greenberg Foundation. That money came from the Trump Foundation, according to the tax filings of both Trump's and Greenberg's foundations.

Call me cynical, but doesn't this sound very much like Trump's people arranged a million-dollar hole-in-one contest that they knew nobody could win because they knew the hole was short? And then, when they got caught, El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago tapped the foundation to cover his ass. Please, by all means, hand this guy the federal treasury to play with. Splendid idea all around.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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