The following article by Celeste Katz with Newsweek was posted on the Naitonal Memo website October 23, 2017:
Maybe it just slipped her mind.
Ivanka Trump’s federal financial disclosure report doesn’t mention her past involvement with the charitable foundation that bears her family’s name—and which remains under investigation for self-dealing.
President Donald Trump’s daughter is working as an advisor to him in Washington while her two adult brothers run the family’s business empire. As a result, she was required to submit details about her income and jobs outside the federal government over a period of several years before she joined the executive branch.
But even after multiple updates, Ivanka Trump’s financial disclosure form appears to make no mention of her time as a director of the Donald J. Trump Foundation, which New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is investigating for fraud.
“The reason senior White House officials disclose their financial interests is so the American people can be sure they are not attempting to personally profit from their public position,” Harrell Kirstein of American Bridge, the progressive opposition-research PAC which flagged the omission, told Newsweek.
“Ivanka Trump and her father think they’re above the law. They’re not,” Kirstein continued. “At every turn, they have been caught lying and attempting to sell out the public for their own personal gain.”
The White House press office did not immediately respond to a Friday Newsweek inquiry about Ivanka Trump’s disclosure forms or her involvement in the Foundation, which is declared in the charitable organization’s 990 tax forms.
Schneiderman opened the investigation in June 2016, questioning why the foundation hadn’t registered with the state while engaged in fundraising. Not registering, the attorney general said, allowed the Trump charitable organization to skirt the rigors of outside audits.
As laid out in Washington Post investigations, the Trump Foundation admitted to the Internal Revenue Service that it had broken the rules against “self-dealing” that prevent heads of non-rofits from using charity funds to benefit themselves, their relatives or their business interests.
Trump representatives have called the inquiries by Schneiderman, a Democrat, politically motivated.
A Schneiderman spokeswoman, Amy Spitalnick, confirmed Friday via email that the foundation “is still under investigation by this office and cannot legally dissolve until that investigation is complete. Its fundraising activities remain suspended following the AG’s notice of violation last fall.”
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