David Fahrenthold Quotes

Donald Trump was in a tuxedo, standing next to his award: a statue of a palm tree, as tall as a toddler. It was 2010, and Trump was being honored by a charity - the Palm Beach Police Foundation - for his 'selfless support' of its cause. His support did not include any of his own money.

- David Fahrenthold

I promise not to take my thousands of dollars in student loan debt and move to Mexico. At least not right away.

- David Fahrenthold

'The Post' is a fairly fusty place when it comes to profanity. If a reporter tries to get a bad word into a story, the word is usually forwarded to top editors, who consider it with the gravity and speed that the Vatican applies to candidates for sainthood.

- David Fahrenthold

In a given year, the government may decide that farmers are growing more raisins than Americans will want to eat. That would cause supply to outstrip demand. Raisin prices would drop. And raisin farmers might go out of business.

- David Fahrenthold

The national raisin reserve is real.

- David Fahrenthold

We Harvard students live in a tourist attraction with movie stars and geniuses; we're recognized on all continents as the creme of the brulee, the syrup on the pancakes of greatness. Yet most of us complain like vegans at a barbecue cook-off.

- David Fahrenthold

Trump has made claims about himself - about his charitable giving, his business success, even the size of the crowd at his inauguration - that are not supported by the facts.

- David Fahrenthold

Marty Baron, 'The Post''s executive editor, stopped me in the elevator lobby late one debate night and suggested we look into the Trump Foundation specifically. I also became interested in researching Trump's broader history of charity.

- David Fahrenthold

Miami is the place where all great Medicare fraud schemes come from. It has a great concentration of professional criminals and old people.

- David Fahrenthold

For me, the thing that is different about Trump is that you don't realize it, and I didn't realize it, but there is a rhythm that the political press - including myself - expects people to show in terms of embarrassing statements or shameful acts. And that is spinning it away and finally being forced to apologize, and then apologize again.

- David Fahrenthold

So much about Trump is... mysterious and slippery. Everything in his business record, you had to ask him for the details. He made himself the only source. He would either not tell you, or he was often an unreliable narrator about his own life.

- David Fahrenthold

Once money goes into a charity, it is tax exempt, so that's a benefit you get. And in return, you have to use the assets of the charity to serve the public good. So if Trump is using this money basically to save his businesses, the money isn't helping people. That's a violation of the letter and the spirit of law.

- David Fahrenthold

The federal government requires that its loans be paid back within 10 years of graduation, and Harvard has pegged its loans to the same 10-year timetable. Yet despite Harvard's low default rate, the idea of years of loan debt is daunting for some students even before it's time to pay back.

- David Fahrenthold

The trouble with dead people often begins with something called the Death Master File, which is kept by the Social Security Administration. Every day, new reports are added, provided by relatives, funeral homes, and the state agencies that issue official death certificates. The list contains 90 million reports.

- David Fahrenthold

So many rich people, when they get into philanthropy, they have one thing they like, or several things they focus on. They pick a disease or a college or some kind of non-profit. They produce good results through that cause, but also they get recognized; there's some sort of monument to what they did.

- David Fahrenthold

Federal election laws bar candidates from the 'personal use' of campaign donations - a ban meant to stop candidates from buying things unrelated to their runs for office. If a purchase is a result of campaign activity, the government allows it.

- David Fahrenthold

The biggest correlation you find is with Trump's own personal and business interests. He lives in Palm Beach part of the year, where charity galas are a big part of the life. And he runs a club in Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago, that depends a lot on being rented out by charities, who can pay as much as $275,000 per night to rent out his club.

- David Fahrenthold

We learned that Trump had not given a million dollars away. When Corey Lewandowski told me that, it was a lie.

- David Fahrenthold

When bills come in, Medicare get so many bills every day, it pays most of them and then goes back later to figure out if they were fraudulent, if it ever goes back at all.

- David Fahrenthold

The point of my stories was not to defeat Trump. The point was to tell readers the facts about this man running for president. How reliable was he at keeping promises? How much moral responsibility did he feel to help those less fortunate than he? By the end of the election, I felt I'd done my job.

- David Fahrenthold

The Trump campaign generally does not respond at all to my requests for information - either requests for broader data on Trump's charitable giving or narrow requests for information about specific subjects, like the $20,000 portrait of himself that Trump seems to have purchased with money from his charity.

- David Fahrenthold

In five cases, the Trump Foundation told the IRS that it had given a gift to a charity whose leaders told 'The Post' that they had never received it. In two other cases, companies listed as donors to the Trump Foundation told 'The Post' that those listings were incorrect.

- David Fahrenthold

IRS rules generally prohibit acts of 'self-dealing,' in which a charity's leaders use the nonprofit group's money to buy things for themselves.

- David Fahrenthold

If I'm owed money, but I say, 'Don't pay me, pay my cousin. Don't pay me, pay my charity,' you can do that, but then the IRS requires that you pay income tax on that. It's your income if you earned it and you directed where it went. If you exercised control over where the money went, you have to pay income tax on that.

- David Fahrenthold

In 1996, Trump had crashed a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a charity opening a nursery school for children with AIDS. Trump, who had never donated to the charity, stole a seat onstage that had been saved for a big contributor.

- David Fahrenthold

There's two sides to Trump's character, at least his pre-presidential character. One was, 'I'm the richest man you could possibly imagine, I live the life of Scrooge McDuck.' The other side was, 'I need your money. Give me money.'

- David Fahrenthold

The Trump people make it extremely hard to figure out what's going on with their businesses, so we've done things like try to figure out all the people, the charities who rented out ballrooms and hotel rooms, all the NBA teams that stay at his hotels, people that pay him a lot of money and have other choices.

- David Fahrenthold

In the past, whistleblowers have had their desks moved to break rooms, broom closets, and basements. It's a clever punishment, good-government activists say, that exploits a gray area in the law. The whole thing can look minor on paper. They moved your office. So what?

- David Fahrenthold

Trump started his foundation in 1987 to give away the proceeds from his book 'The Art of the Deal.' It has no paid employees and a board of five: Trump, three of his children, and a longtime Trump Organization employee. They all work a half-hour per week, according to the foundation's most recent Internal Revenue Service filing.

- David Fahrenthold

In theory, it is illegal to make the basement into a bureaucratic purgatory. In 1994, for instance, Congress prohibited agencies from making significant changes in a whistleblower's 'working conditions' as punishment for speaking out.

- David Fahrenthold

In 2007, Donald Trump spent $20,000 that belonged to his charity - the Donald J. Trump Foundation - to buy a six-foot-tall portrait of himself during a fundraiser auction at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida.

- David Fahrenthold

The Palm Beach Police Foundation is a client of Trump's. They pay to rent out Mar-a-Lago every year.

- David Fahrenthold

Trump was on WrestleMania in 2007. And in that year and 2009, the McMahons gave a total of $5 million. Now, we know that wasn't Trump's payment for WrestleMania. He got paid separately, but about the same time, they made this $5 million donation.

- David Fahrenthold

If your selling access to somebody who is a future president or current secretary of state, or if there's an implication that you are, that matters.

- David Fahrenthold

The task of tracking deaths for the federal bureaucracy is an enormous one; about 2.5 million Americans die each year. Federal officials say the vast majority of these cases are handled correctly: The death is recorded. Government money is no longer sent to that person. But not always.

- David Fahrenthold

The federal helium program sells vast amounts of the gas to U.S. companies that use it in everything from party balloons to MRI machines. If the government stops, no one else is ready.

- David Fahrenthold

You know how country music stars get an extra 10 years on their life when they go to Branson? Like you're washed up, and you go to Branson, then you can last another 10 years. That's what bashing the media does.

- David Fahrenthold

There are two main organizations that rate charities. They look at their finances and decide whether they are giving enough to the causes they claim to focus on. Something like 80 or 90% of their money actually goes to a charitable purpose.

- David Fahrenthold

Many graduates, moving often in the first years of their post-college life, simply forget to update their addresses with Harvard, and so bills go unanswered and uncollected. This is called a 'technical default.'

- David Fahrenthold

What's a good metaphor for a Harvard student? A talking, gold-plated pile of manure, wearing a fleece.

- David Fahrenthold

Millions of people would give literally anything to get their kids into a school like Harvard, and millions more simple admire it as another, brighter world.

- David Fahrenthold

It wasn't until the second half of my first year that I realized you have to try to make friends and meet people at Harvard; the chances don't come to you.

- David Fahrenthold

If you have Trump avoiding income tax and money coming in, and then he's still able to control it and use it as if it was his income to help his interests, then you're starting to see a bigger legal problem.

- David Fahrenthold

Nonprofits such as the Trump Foundation are prohibited from giving political gifts.

- David Fahrenthold

Financial Aid Office (FAO) administrators are scrambling to educate students on repaying loans, but a disparity in knowledge persists.

- David Fahrenthold

I personally can barely remember what I was like before I came to college, what made me happy or worried or confident. I don't remember what I expected in my future, except that 'President of the United States' was about halfway up the ladder.

- David Fahrenthold

Since Trump began running for president in summer 2015, he has repeatedly used his hotels and golf courses as venues for his campaign events - and paid himself for the privilege.

- David Fahrenthold

During the 2016 election cycle, Trump's campaign spent at least $791,000 to hold events at 12 Trump-branded venues: three hotels, seven golf courses, a condo building and Mar-a-Lago, federal campaign filings show.

- David Fahrenthold

I feel like I understand Trump's character better than the average person now, having seen all of these little interactions with charity. I wanted to keep doing something that's like that, and not just doing pure politics. So my piece of the Trump empire is the golf courses, Mar-a-Lago, and the winery.

- David Fahrenthold

Because of a jury-rigged and outdated system meant to track deaths, the government has trouble determining exactly which Americans are deceased.

- David Fahrenthold

All of philanthropy is harnessing that urge to have your name on something, and using it for good.

- David Fahrenthold

The perception a lot of folks have of the Clintons, even folks who are Democrats, see the Clintons as bending the rules.

- David Fahrenthold

Trump and his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, have both been criticized during their campaigns for activities related to their foundations.

- David Fahrenthold

The U.S. government has a problem with dead people. For one thing, it pays them way too much money.

- David Fahrenthold

I read the collected works of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and made a list of everything the old Baptist preacher had ever condemned as immoral or untoward. The subjects of his condemnation ranged from college-age women going braless to dogs wearing clothes to Beyonce.

- David Fahrenthold

Even when he was just a reality-TV star, Trump was the kind of star who got a cover story in 'Time.' But that wasn't true. The 'Time' cover is a fake. There was no 1 March 2009 issue of 'Time' magazine. And there was no issue at all in 2009 that had Trump on the cover.

- David Fahrenthold

Don't focus on what Trump says. Focus on the results of his actions. Stay in your lane and focus on one particular area.

- David Fahrenthold

I started covering Trump's charitable giving sort of by accident.

- David Fahrenthold

What I found in my research on Trump's charitable giving was that often he would promise something and then never deliver, but sort of go around with people believing he'd done this thing he's promised.

- David Fahrenthold

I started at 'The Post' as an intern in 2000 right after I got out of college.

- David Fahrenthold

There are some things about Trump's foundation and charity that I really want to know. I worry there may not be enough time to figure it all out.

- David Fahrenthold

The government simply waits for farmers to grow their crops - nine months of growing grapes, then two to three weeks of drying them in the sun. Then it takes away a part of that crop and stores it in warehouses around California.

- David Fahrenthold

Trump has a lot of contacts in the world of charity because he rents out ballrooms, hotel ballrooms, the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago to charities. Charities are often the ones that rent out these ballrooms for big events.

- David Fahrenthold

Things live and die, and then someone processes them into edible portions. This is a complete telling of the story, 'Food.' The basic plot hasn't changed for centuries. I shouldn't need to know any more details, any more history, in order to decide if my food tastes good or not.

- David Fahrenthold

The Trump Foundation's tax returns are public. That's one thing. So we can look through them in a way that we can't look through his personal tax returns. They're publicly available going back to the beginning of the foundation, which is 1987.

- David Fahrenthold

A lot of other wealthy people feel the responsibility to take some of the wealth they've been given and give back: to give a lot of money to a particular cancer charity or to a group researching some particular disease or their alma mater. We haven't really found anything like that with Trump.

- David Fahrenthold

I am not going to argue about whether I am a nasty guy.

- David Fahrenthold

Trump called me a 'nasty guy' on the phone, and some of his surrogates called me 'obsessed' and biased on TV.

- David Fahrenthold

We are in the era when I go home and have dinner with my kids and put them to bed, and hours later I go to Twitter, and the world has changed.

- David Fahrenthold

Trump is somebody who sees the media as basically his main constituency. So much of his self-worth and his image and his view of what the presidency should be about is the media and how he is reflected in the media.

- David Fahrenthold

Trump is a really complicated story and a difficult candidate to write about.

- David Fahrenthold

Some courts have said moving an employee to a basement or closet usually amounts to punishment. But others have said this is a decision that should be made case by case. How nice is the basement office? How big is the closet?

- David Fahrenthold

If you have $1 billion, you can use the Clinton Foundation as a conduit, and as it goes by, Clinton gives it his prestige.

- David Fahrenthold

It's so hard to cover Trump. What Trump says, what he feels, what he thinks changes from day to day.

- David Fahrenthold

For years, Trump himself was the Trump Foundation's only source of money: Between 1987 and 2006, he donated $5.4 million.

- David Fahrenthold

If someone shut down Twitter tomorrow, and Trump had to get started on some other platform, he'd never do it. And I think the whole country would be different.

- David Fahrenthold

If you're the president of a charity, you can't take the money out of the charity and use it to buy things for yourself. And you can't take the money out of the charity and use it to buy things for your business.

- David Fahrenthold

You could be a corrupt doctor, but at least you have to go to the medical school first. Right?

- David Fahrenthold

The expectation with family foundations is that if your name is on the foundation, unless you're dead, it's your money that's being given away. And even if you are dead, it was your money before.

- David Fahrenthold

I used to cover the environment, and it does have the advantage of the fact that when you call people up and ask them questions, their first instinct is not to lie to you.

- David Fahrenthold