NY Brings $2.8M Suit to Dissolve Trump Foundation

The attorney general also quotes several emails in which former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowsk appears to dictate where to funnel donations.

“We should start thinking about how you want to distribute the funds collected for the Vets,” Lewandowski wrote on Jan. 29, 2016, referring to the Donald J. Trump Special Event for Veterans.

Of the $5.6 million that event raised, Attorney General Underwood says more than $2.8 million was contributed to the foundation. Private donors donated the rest to veterans’ charity groups without going through the foundation.

Underwood says that an email Lewandowski sent some days later, on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, exposed the electioneering purposes of the foundation.

“Is there any way we can make some disbursements [from the proceeds of the fundraiser] this week while in Iowa?” Lewandowski asked in a message. “Specifically on Saturday.”

In one of the petition’s more ironic passages, Trump railed against the rules that would prevent him from using his charity for electoral purposes – rules that Underwood accuses Trump of breaking during his rant.

“They’re willing to take your tax exemption and tax status away from you if you talk,” Trump said in South Carolina in 2016, according to a footnote.

“That happened during Lyndon Johnson’s reign and I would put that back so fast,” then-candidate Trump added.

True to Trump’s prediction, Underwood seeks to unravel the president’s charity.

"The attorney general therefore brings this special proceeding to dissolve the foundation for its persistently illegal conduct, enjoin its board members from future service as a director of any not-for-profit authorized by New York law, to obtain restitution and penalties, and to direct the foundation to cooperate with the attorney general in the lawful distribution of its remaining assets to qualified charitable entities.”

The six causes of action include multiple counts seeking to shut down the foundation.

The Trump Foundation’s statement suggests a bitter fight ahead.

Filled with mudslinging against the top state prosecutor, it makes the irrelevant note that Underwood’s predecessor, Eric Schneiderman, “was recently forced to resign his office in disgrace” over physical abuse allegations.

“The acting NYAG’s recent statement that battling the White House is ‘the most important work [she has] ever done’ shows that such political attacks will continue unabated,” the statement concludes.

Underwood made the above remark last month in her interview by the New York state Legislature, but was describing how her office's efforts spanned two presidential administrations.

“During the Obama administration, we fought to defend the Clean Power Plan, to preserve the Voting Rights Act and other civil rights laws, and to resist other states’ efforts to impose draconian restrictions on undocumented immigrants,” she said.

Such efforts, she added, have “become even more important” during the Trump era.

Trump meanwhile reacted to the lawsuit on Twitter this morning by recasting New York’s two-year investigation as a sign of desperation, and by misstating history.

“Schneiderman, who ran the Clinton campaign in New York, never had the guts to bring this ridiculous case, which lingered in their office for almost 2 years,” he tweeted. “Now he resigned his office in disgrace, and his disciples brought it when we would not settle.”

Though the former New York attorney general did not in fact run Hillary Clinton's campaign, Clinton did appoint Schneiderman along with more than 100 other people to a leadership council in 2015 while she was running in the New York presidential primary. Scripps News chided Schneiderman in an exclusive report the following year for not holding the Clinton Foundation to donor-reporting requirements.

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