David Fahrenthold Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

When it comes to charities, there's a lot of fraud.

When people make donations to non profits, they want to know that their money goes to good use.

When it turns out that you were supposed to be disclosing all these foreign government donations to the Clinton Global Initiative while you were Secretary of State, and you didn't, and now the Clinton Global Initiative is having to restate their 990s, that doesn't sound very trustworthy to me.

I’ve looked at your website and see all the contributors to your campaigns. I don’t suppose that you ask every one of them how they made the money that they donated.

The spread of online information isn't just good for charities. It's also good for donors. You can go to a site like Charity Navigator, which evaluates nonprofits on their financial health as well as the amount of information they share about their work.

We look at Donald Trump: his bottom line is interconnected to all kinds of financial interests that he refuses to disclose. They actually affect his net worth.

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.

To us, the definition of philanthropy is what we spend. A P&L account means expenditure, lines of revenue. There is a surplus; it goes to the balance sheet. A transparent foundation should disclose this.

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.

Donors are sick of writing that $200 check to the Red Cross and not knowing whether it goes for the executive director's salary or the office rent.

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.

Donald Trump is the first candidate ever to run for president in the last 40-plus years who has not released his tax returns, so everything he says about charity or anything else, we can't prove it.

My advice would be that once [Donald Trump] enters office, there should be a separation, a blind trust or some kind of blind trust.

It was only in 2001 that I set up a foundation, Arghyam. That was pretty much to learn the ropes of how to give, what to do.

We demand Congress access and publicly release Donald Trump's tax returns!

Find an organization that you want to support and get involved. You can give money or give time.

By the way, in Mrs. Clinton's returns, you saw a lot of income coming from donors to the Clinton Foundation and people who benefitted from her State Department term as well.

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

When they asked me what charity I wanted to play for on 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire?' the first thing that came to my mind was that this would be a great opportunity to let people know about TOPSoccer.

The goal of the program, called Giving With Purpose, is to teach college students - and anyone else who cares to register - how to beneficially contribute to charity. That's not necessarily easy. There are IRS rules for giving that must be learned, and there is wayward, wasteful philanthropy to be avoided.

When I became an actor, I decided I had enough time, talent, and resources to support people who are in dire need of assistance.