Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Nigerian Army Chief Faces Death Threats from Boko Haram, But Says He Already Beat Them

BY SIOBHÁN O'GRADY-SEPTEMBER 20, 2016

Last week, Boko Haram extremists released a video threatening Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, Army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen.Tukur Yusuf Buratai, and other top officials in a violent warning to fear the group’s renewed strength.

Buratai just shrugged it off. “They warn they are very strong, which is a lie,” Buratai told Foreign Policy in an exclusive interview last week at a hotel in Northern Virginia, where he was touting his troops’ successes against the militant group while on a speaking tour in the United States. “They don’t have that ability that they are claiming.”

Boko Haram has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions more in recent years, sparking a refugee and security crisis across the Lake Chad region. Since Buratai took over as the army’s top ranking officer last July, the Nigerian military has repeatedly claimed a technical victory over the group, which once controlled a territory the size of Belgium and is now largely confined to hideouts in the Sambisa Forest, which stretches some 23,000 square miles through Nigeria’s northeast.

“You can beat your chest and say, ‘Yes, we’ve defeated the Boko Haram insurgents to the extent that they are not holding or administering any territory in Nigeria right now as they were before,’” Buratai told FP. He also spoke at the Atlantic Council think-tank in Washington and the Virginia Military Institute three hours south of the capital, but said he did not meet with any defense officials at the Pentagon.

Buhari ran for office in 2015 on a platform that promised increased security following Boko Haram’s rise, winning him popularity among civilians frustrated by former President Goodluck Jonathan’s unwillingness to take the militants seriously until they had wreaked havoc across the country’s predominantly Muslim northeast.

A regional taskforce made up of troops from Nigeria, Niger, Benin, Cameroon, and Chad helped beat Boko Haram out of many of its strongholds. But once the group began to lose its grip on territory in early 2015, it aggressively shifted to more asymmetrical warfare: For months, militants regularly launched suicide attacks in and around Nigeria, often sending young girls into markets to detonate themselves.

According to Action on Armed Violence, a U.K-based nonprofit that tracks conflict around the world, suicide attacks killed nearly 650 civilians in Nigeria between January and July of last year alone. Fear of those attacks and distrust that the Nigerian military could permanently keep Boko Haram out of villages where they regularly executed or forcibly recruited civilians added to the region’s already growing migration crisis. Maiduguri, the capital of Nigeria’s Borno State, is now home to nearly 1.7 million displaced people, many of whom are living in overcrowded camps where food and medical aid is scarce, if accessible at all.

For that reason, Jennifer Cooke, director of at the Africa program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Buhari was wrong to claim even a technical victory, “because defeat and victory at this point are kind of meaningless.”

“I do think they have been successful in weakening Boko Haram, but they’re still dealing with asymmetrical attacks,” she said.

During an hour-long conversation with FP, Buratai said although he believes Nigeria’s armed forces were prepared for Boko Haram’s eventual shift to more civilian bombings, he conceded they “never envisaged it to be at that scale.” He declined to estimate how many militants now belong to the group, but said their increased reliance on propaganda is indicative of its inability to effectively influence the local population.

He believes that the extremists have proven themselves so violent that very few civilians would now willingly join them, despite the continued economic challenges that have plagued Nigeria’s isolated northeast — and prompted some loyalty to the extremists — since the group first turned violent around 2009.

Buratai said the military’s ability to oust Boko Haram from its strongholds in the north has “restored the confidence of Nigerians in their military.” Under his watch, the Nigerian Army has begun live-tweeting its successes to improve transparency about its operations and counter Boko Haram’s propaganda narrative that it continues to threaten the state’s military.

The social media campaign offers a glimpse into the brutality of the fight against both Boko Haram and the Niger Delta Avengers, a rebel group that regularly attacks the country’s oil pipelines further south.

This month alone, @HQNigerianArmy has tweeted multiple photos of bloody corpses that allegedly belong to captured Boko Haram members.The account recently tweeted that the military had fatally wounded Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau, who they have claimed to kill multiple times in recent years and whose leadership came into question this summer as Boko Haram continues to try to rebrand itself as the Islamic State’s West Africa caliphate. But Buratai told FP he believes Shekau was likely killed as far back as 2013, and that today he just has many “clones” who try to convince the public he is still alive and well.

“Civilians know he was killed,” he said.

In one recent tweet, a photo of a severed leg is accompanied by a caption describing it as belonging to a female suicide bomber neutralized by government troops. In another, a man wearing ripped camouflage pants lies dead next to his motorbike, one hand resting on his rifle. The caption claims the photo portrays the aftermath of Nigerian troops clearing out Boko Haram hideouts.

“As soon as we have any encounter, or we carry out any operation within the theater, we make sure we get it across to our people,” Buratai said.

But critics maintain that lack of due process for Boko Haram suspects continues, and that men who willingly joined the group and those who were forcibly conscripted are often treated as equals in crowded detention centers.

“Torture and other ill-treatment by police and military remained pervasive,” Amnesty International said in its 2015-2016 report on Nigeria, noting that Boko Haram suspects “continued to die in detention.”

“You’ve got thousands of people surrendering and thousands of people being captured, so they may be overwhelmed in terms of sorting out culpability,” Cooke said. But, she said, Nigeria’s military “do themselves no favors by making the default throwing people in prison without any process of any kind.”

When U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visited Nigeria last month, hecautioned government and religious leaders against being “tempted to crack down on everyone and anyone who could theoretically pose some sort of a threat.”

The United States has provided some aid to the region in its fight against the terrorist group, including U.S. drones that fly reconnaissance missions from a base in northern Cameroon. But the Nigerian government has repeatedly expressed frustration with a U.S. law widely known for its author, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), which prevents Washington from providing material support to military units that have committed human rights violations. Buratai defended his soldiers’ human rights record in his conversation with FP, calling Nigeria’s military “one of the most human rights-observant” in the world.
“We want to believe it can still get better, there is hope,” he said of the U.S.-Nigeria relationship. “We still hope that it will be better than what we are doing now.”

But Buratai found himself at the center of a particularly violent episode last December, when Shiite protesters in the northern city of Zaria surrounded his convoy in what the military insisted was an assassination attempt against him. Human Rights Watch reported that the Nigerian military opened fire on the protesters, who belonged to the Islamic Movement of Nigeria, potentially killing hundreds of civilians. It sparked a major diplomatic row between Abuja and Tehran, which has historically provided support to the Nigerian Shiite community.

“At best it was a brutal overreaction, and at worst it was a planned attack on the minority Shiite group,” Daniel Beleke, Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said in December.

When pressed to explain how the protest escalated so quickly, Buratai told FPthat he feared for his life and that his troops acted in self-defense. Many of the protesters were killed, he claimed, by their own Molotov cocktails.

And according to his account, the protesters were the first to turn violent.

“What they did that day, there is no way any country would accept that behavior,” he said. “That’s complete rebellion.”

Photo credit: Stringer/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

What happens to a pollster when Russia doesn't like the results?

The Moscow Times visits the Levada Centre which fears closure after having been added to the Kremlin’s ‘foreign agent’ list

The Levada Centre recently published a drop in the approval ratings of Putin’s United Russia party.

Photograph: TASS/Barcroft Images

Eva Hartog for the Moscow Times, part of the New East network-Tuesday 20 September 2016

When Russia’s most respected independent polling centre received the news that it had been labelled a “foreign agent” – a Soviet-era term with connotations of espionage – nobody who worked there was surprised.

The ruling came less than two weeks before Russia’s parliamentary elections and just after Levada had published findings of an 8% drop in the approval ratings of the ruling party, United Russia

On 5 September the Justice Ministry added the Levada Centre to its ever growing register of so-called agents after accusing the NGO of being engaged in “political activity” and receiving funding from abroad.

In the short term, the Levada Centre will have to identify itself as a “foreign agent” when it carries out surveys. In the long term the fear is that government audits, an absence of funding and increased stigma will grind their work to a halt.

Though the pollster first received a warning from prosecutors in 2013, Natalya Zorkaya, head of sociopolitical research at their headquarters in central Moscow, said the ruling “feels final” this time.

Since the Russian government introduced the foreign agent law in 2012 –described as a crackdown on civil society – over 138 groups have been added to the register, at least 22 of which have since closed.

Though the centre can contest the label in court, as the Kremlin has been keen to point out, Levada’s troubles are a telling reflection of the political shift in Russia since the end of the Soviet Union.

President Putin visits United Russia’s campaign headquarters in Moscow during the recent parliamentary election. Photograph: TASS / Barcroft Images

The Levada Centre was born during perestroika in the late 1980s, when Russian politics started to open up. As citizens began to question the policies of Mikhail Gorbachev’s government so too did a group of pollsters led by Yury Levada, the godfather of Russian sociology.

“There had been no interest in opinion polling before,” says Lev Gudkov, who has run the centre since Levada’s death in 2006. “The attitude in Soviet times can be summarised as: why ask people what they think, they get what we tell them,” he adds.

When in 1989 sociologists at the All-Russian Public Opinion Centre (VTsIOM), including Levada and Gudkov, decided to ask citizens to respond to a long list of questions; they expected several hundred replies at most. Instead, they received 200,000 responses.

“It was the first time people were asked what they thought, so they approached it like a referendum,” says Gudkov.

By the time Vladimir Putin took the presidency in 2000, Yury Levada’s team were continuing to document public opinion on sensitive topics including the war in the republic of Chechnya – credited with allowing Putin to strengthen his hold over the country in his early days – and public support for United Russia.

But for the government, the lack of control over potentially opinion-shaping research was a concern. There was a staff reshuffle at VTsIOM in 2003 as the Kremlin apparently looked to appoint more pliable board members.

Yury Levada resented the interference and set up his own private company, the Levada Centre, which soon grew into an authoritative independent voice on Russian public opinion.

A pro-Russian celebration in Simferopol, a city in Crimea which was annexed by Russia in 2014.

A pro-Russian celebration in Simferopol, a city in Crimea which was annexed by Russia in 2014. Photograph: Vadim Ghirda/AP

According to Gudkov, some of Levada’s harshest critics have been people in the liberal opposition who argue the numbers are skewed. “They don’t want to accept that a large mass of people, poor and provincial, support an authoritative regime,” he says. “But it means they’re effectively saying: I only rely on polls that agree with my point of view.”

Levada’s polls have consistently shown overwhelming support for Russia’s decision annexation of Crimea in 2014, for example: “In focus groups, respondents say: ‘We showed the world our teeth, we finally started respecting ourselves,” Gudkov says. “These people are poor, they suffered hugely after the fall of the Soviet Union. All of Putin’s demagoguery plays into this.”

The results are supportive of the government, but it’s Levada’s interpretation of why people are supportive that has led the government to accuse the centre of having a political agenda.

When building a case against them the justice ministry cited several of Gudkov’s statements which were critical of the government including one where he described Russia as “a closed authoritarian system, where the state leans on law enforcement, special forces, oligarchs, state officials and bureaucracy and represents their interests.”

While some people have made public statements to support Levada, including Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov and state poll agencies FOM and VTsIOM , its future looks insecure.

Gudkov says some regional authorities have already stopped working with them and the fear is that the stigma of the “foreign agent” label could make respondents wary of answering them truthfully.

Meanwhile they will be forced to sever ties with all foreign partners, including educational institutions, especially those in the US who have received funding from the Pentagon.

A version of this article first appeared on The Moscow Times

Where Was Donald Trump Born? He Even Lies About That

Photo Credit: Michael Vadon / Flickr

By Peter Dreier -September 20, 2016

Since 2011, Donald Trump has beenperpetuating the lie that Barack Obama was born outside the United States. Trump became a leader of the so-called "birther" movement in order to promote himself as a potential presidential candidate, exploiting the racism and paranoia of many Americans who are now supporting his campaign. Trump's birther efforts were designed to question the legitimacy of America's first black president. Even after Obama released his birth certificate from Hawaii—something no other president has ever felt compelled to do—Trump continued to play the birther card.

After spinning this lie for many years, last week Trump reluctantly acknowledged that President Obama was born in the United States, although he refused to admit he had been lying about this for years and refused to apologize to Obama.

Despite his turnaound, Trump can't take back the damage he's done by repeating the falsehood to bolster his political ascendancy.

The birther lie confirms the harsh truth often attributed to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda chief:

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." A new NBC News poll conducted in June and July found that 72 percent of registered Republican voters say they still doubt President Obama's place of birth. And 41 percent outright disagreed with the statement, "Barack Obama was born in the United States."

Earlier this week, 51 percent of voters who back Trump said Obama was not born in the U.S., according to a YouGov/Economist poll. Overall, 71 percent of all adults correctly believe that Barack Obama was born in America.

By forcing the media to ask questions about Obama's birthplace, Trump has cleverly deflected attention away from his own ancestry and origins. At no point during this campaign has a reporter asked Trump where he was born or to prove his citizenship with official documents.

After an exhaustive investigation, I have discovered evidence that Trump does not want the country to see. I have learned the exact location of Trump's birth.

He was born on third base.

In popular parlance, "born on third base" means that someone was born to privilege. Many people who are born on third base acknowledge it has provided them with significant advantages throughout their lives. But Trump, like some other heirs to big fortunes, refuses to discuss his birthplace. Is he ashamed of his origins? Or does he fail to realize that Fred Trump, a wealthy developer, was not only his father but also his manager and third-base coach?

It's rich people like Trump who led football coach Barry Switzer to quip: "Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple." At the 1988 Democratic convention, former Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower used that line to excoriate George H.W. Bush, whose father was a wealthy Yale graduate and one-time U.S. senator. Now Chuck Collins, great-grandson of meatpacker Oscar Mayer, has written a book, Born on Third Base, explaining why people like Trump are able to fool themselves—and perhaps others—into believing that their success was due entirely to their own hard work.

Obama has always told the truth about where he was born. But Trump has consistently lied about his birthplace on third base. Despite this, Trump's fabrication has not become the fodder for news stories or an issue in the presidential contest. That seems like a real double standard.

During his presidential campaign, Trump has claimed he made it on his own. When pushed, he acknowledges that his father loaned him what he's called the "small amount" of $1 million. In fact, Trump inherited his father's real-estate empire worth tens of millions of dollars, made by building middle-class housing financed by the federal government. Earlier in Donald's career, his father paid his son's debts. Donald also took several massive loans from his siblings' trust funds.

One can see Trump's entire life as one of entitlement. But we can also see, in Trump's personality, someone who recognizes that he does not deserve his success. He is obsessively insecure and thin-skinned about his intelligence as well as about his manhood, and about his own accomplishments.

In 2004, in an interview with CNN, Trump said, "I went to the Wharton School of Finance. I got very good marks. I was a good student. It's the best business school in the world, as far as I'm concerned."

Trump has repeated that claim many times since. Each time, it isn't clear if he's trying to convince his interviewer or himself.

In 2011, in another interview with CNN, Trump said: "Let me tell you, I'm a really smart guy. I was a really good student at the best school in the country."

"I went to the Wharton School of Finance," he said multiple times during a speech last year in Phoenix. "I'm, like, a really smart person."

In an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press" last year, he described Wharton as "probably the hardest there is to get into." He added, "Some of the great business minds in the world have gone to Wharton."

Only someone who questions his own intelligence would feel compelled to make these public statements.

Trump surely knows he didn't get into Wharton on his own merits. He transferred into Wharton's undergraduate program after spending two years at Fordham University in New York. But Trump's grades at Fordham were not good enough to transfer to the University of Pennsylvania, home of the Wharton School. In her 2001 biography, The Trumps, Gwenda Blair wrote that Trump got into Wharton as a special favor from a "friendly" admissions officer who knew Trump's older brother, Freddy.

Moreover, a 2011 article in Salon reported that Trump has exaggerated his academic accomplishments at Wharton. According to Salon, on at least two occasions—in a 1973 profile and in a 1976 article—the New York Times reported that Trump "graduated first in his class" at Wharton in 1968.

That is a lie. Trump didn't even make the honor roll while at Wharton. It is likely that Trump was the original source for that falsehood, but it isn't entirely clear, since neither Times story attributes it to Trump. But the lie that Trump was first in his class was repeated in many other articles as well as books about Trump, so he clearly knew it was out there in the public domain and didn't bother to correct it.

"He was not in any kind of leadership. I certainly doubt he was the smartest guy in the class," Steve Perelman, Trump's Wharton classmate, told the Daily Pennsylvanian, the campus newspaper, last year.

Trump's efforts to portray himself as an up-by-his-bootstraps entrepreneur is typical of the self-made man myth surrounding someone who was born on third base but refuses to acknowledge his birthplace.

"It has not been easy for me," Trump said at a town hall meeting on Oct. 26, 2015. "And you know I started off in Brooklyn. My father gave me a small loan of a million dollars."

At a news conference early this year, Trump repeated the same story: "I got a very, very small loan from my father many years ago. I built that into a massive empire and I paid my father back that loan."

An investigation by the Washington Post earlier this year demolished the idea that Trump made it on his own. Not only did Trump's multi-millionaire father provide Donald with a huge inheritance, and set up big-bucks trust accounts to provide his son with a steady income, but his father also was a silent partner in Trump's first real estate projects.

His father's real estate fortune was due, in large measure, to his reliance ongovernment financing and subsidies for his middle-class apartment buildings. It was only because of financing from the Federal Housing Administration that Fred Trump was able to revive his real estate business and build homes for middle-income families. During World War II, Fred Trump constructed FHA-backed housing for U.S. naval personnel near major shipyards along the East Coast. After the war, he continued to rely on FHA financing to construct apartment buildings in New York.

Fred Trump's real estate business was also littered with widespread racial discrimination. Earlier this year, in another investigation, the Washington Postrevealed that Fred Trump had been arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally in New York in 1927. His racism pervaded his business practices. The federal government sued him for denying black families the opportunity to rent apartments in his buildings. When Donald went into business with his father in the 1970s, those racist practices continued, as the New York Times reported. In other words, Donald not only inherited his father's real estate empire, he also inherited his racism.

Trump's first big real estate deal was the construction of the Grand Hyatt hotel, near New York's Grand Central station, in 1978. Fred Trump's Village Construction Corp. provided a $1 million loan. But, as the Post investigation explained, "that loan was only a small part of the father's involvement in the deal."

According to the Post:

"Trump's father—whose name had been besmirched in New York real estate circles after investigations into windfall profits and other abuses in his real estate projects—was an essential silent partner in Trump's initiative. In effect, the son was the front man, relying on his father's connections and wealth, while his father stood silently in the background to avoid drawing attention to himself."

Wayne Barrett's 1992 book, Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, reveals the magnitude of his father's involvement. Fred Trump and the Hyatt hotel chain jointly guaranteed the $70 million construction loan from Manufacturers Hanover bank, "each assuming a 50 percent share of the obligation and each committing itself to complete the project should Donald be unable to finish it."

Trump's father was not only his silent partner but also his safety net. In a 2007 deposition, Donald admitted that he borrowed at least $9 million from his future inheritance when he encountered financial difficulties. In effect, Donald was on welfare. The funding came from his father, not the government. But it actually came indirectly from the government, which had financed Fred Trump's real estate business.

Other investigations have shown that Trump's business career is filled with multiple bankruptcies, bogus businesses (like Trump University), repeated rip-offs of suppliers, contractors and employees who he failed to pay for services rendered, and misuse of the Trump Foundation to feather his own nest while trying to look like a philanthropist. Trump has also lied about the size of his wealth, as various business publications have pointed out. Many observers suggest that one reason Trump has refused to release his tax returns is that they will show that he has repeatedly exaggerated his wealth and, thus, his success.

Like Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate, the Washington Post's investigation provides the documentation needed to confirm Trump's birthplace on third base. But even though he was born on third base, he has had to lie, cheat, and break the law in order to get to home plate.

Peter Dreier is professor of politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. His most recent book is The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (Nation Books).

Trump used $258,000 from his charity to settle legal problems

The Washington Post's David Fahrenthold explains the latest revelations about how Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump may have violated the IRS's rules regarding charitable funds. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)

By David A. Fahrenthold September 20 at 10:26 AM

Donald Trump spent more than a quarter-million dollars from his charitable foundation to settle lawsuits that involved the billionaire’s for-profit businesses, according to interviews and a review of legal documents.

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.

In another case, court papers say one of Trump’s golf courses in New York agreed to settle a lawsuit by making a donation to the plaintiff’s chosen charity. A $158,000 donation was made by the Trump Foundation, according to tax records.

The other expenditures involved smaller amounts. In 2013, Trump used $5,000 from the foundation to buy advertisements touting his chain of hotels in programs for three events organized by a D.C. preservation group. And in 2014, Trump spent $10,000 of the foundation’s money for a portrait of himself bought at a charity fundraiser.

Or, rather, another portrait of himself.

Several years earlier, Trump had used $20,000 from the Trump Foundation to buy a different, six foot-tall portrait.

If the Internal Revenue Service were to find that Trump violated self-dealing rules, the agency could require him to pay penalty taxes or to reimburse the foundation for all the money it spent on his behalf. Trump is also facing scrutiny from the office of the New York attorney general, which is examining whether the foundation broke state charity laws.

More broadly, these cases also provide new evidence that Trump ran his charity in a way that may have violated U.S. tax law and gone against the moral conventions of philanthropy.

“I represent 700 nonprofits a year, and I’ve never encountered anything so brazen,” said Jeffrey Tenenbaum, who advises charities at the Venable law firm in Washington. After The Post described the details of these Trump Foundation gifts, Tenenbaum described them as “really shocking.”

“If he’s using other people’s money — run through his foundation — to satisfy his personal obligations, then that’s about as blatant an example of self-dealing [as] I’ve seen in a while,” Tenenbaum said.

The Post sent the Trump campaign a detailed list of questions about the four cases, but received no response.

The New York attorney general’s office declined to comment when asked whether its inquiry would cover these new cases of possible self-dealing.

Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold is investigating how much Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has given to charity over the past seven years. Here's what he found. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)

Trump founded his charity in 1987 and, for years, was its only donor. But in 2006, Trump gave away almost all of the money he had donated to the foundation, leaving it with just $4,238 at year’s end, according to tax records.

Then, he transformed the Trump Foundation into something rarely seen in the world of philanthropy: a name-branded foundation whose namesake provides none of its money. Trump gave relatively small donations in 2007 and 2008, and afterward: nothing. The foundation’s tax records show no donations from Trump since 2009.

[In 2007, Trump had to face his own falsehoods. And he did, 30 times.]

Its money has come from other donors, most notably pro-wrestling executives Vince and Linda McMahon, who gave a total of $5 million from 2007 to 2009, tax records show. Trump remains the foundation’s president, and he told the IRS in his latest public filings that he works half an hour per week on the charity.

The Post has previously detailed other cases in which Trump used the charity’s money in a way that appeared to violate the law.

In 2013, for instance, the foundation gave $25,000 to a political group supporting Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (R). That gift was made around the same time that Bondi’s office was considering whether to investigate fraud allegations against Trump University. It didn’t.

Tax laws say nonprofits such as the Trump Foundation may not make political gifts. Trump staffers blamed the gift on a clerical error. After The Post reportedon the gift to Bondi’s group this spring, Trump paid a $2,500 penalty tax and reimbursed the Trump Foundation for the $25,000 donation.

In other instances, it appeared that Trump may have violated rules against self-dealing.

In 2012, for instance, Trump spent $12,000 of the foundation’s money to buy a football helmet signed by NFL quarterback Tim Tebow.

And in 2007, Trump’s wife, Melania, bid $20,000 for the six-foot-tall portrait of Trump, done by a “speed painter” during a charity gala at Mar-a-Lago. Later,Trump paid for the painting with $20,000 from the foundation.

In those cases, tax experts said, Trump was not allowed to simply keep these items and display them in a home or business. They had to be put to a charitable use.

Trump’s campaign has not responded to questions about what became of the helmet or the portrait.

The four new cases of possible self-dealing were discovered in the Trump Foundation’s tax filings. While Trump has refused to release his personal tax returns, the foundation’s filings are required to be public.

The case involving the flagpole at Trump’s oceanfront Mar-a-Lago Club began in 2006, when the club put up a giant American flag on the 80-foot pole. Town rules said flagpoles should be 42 feet high at most. Trump’s contention, according to news reports, was: “You don’t need a permit to put up the American flag.”

The town began to fine Trump, $1,250 a day.

Trump’s club sued in federal court, saying that a smaller flag “would fail to appropriately express the magnitude of Donald J. Trump’s . . . patriotism.”

They settled.

The town waived the $120,000 in fines. In September 2007, Trump wrote the town a letter, saying he had done his part as well.

“I have sent a check for $100,000 to Fisher House,” he wrote. The town had chosen Fisher House, which runs a network of comfort homes for the families of veterans and military personnel receiving medical treatment, as the recipient of the money. Trump added that, for good measure, “I have sent a check for $25,000” to another charity, the American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial.

Trump provided the town with copies of the checks, which show that they came from the Trump Foundation.

In the town of Palm Beach, nobody seems to have objected that the fines assessed on Trump’s business were being erased by a donation from a charity.

“I don’t know that there was any attention paid to that at the time. We just saw two checks signed by Donald J. Trump,” said John Randolph, the Palm Beach town attorney. “I’m sure we were satisfied with it.”

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.

Greenberg’s foundation reported getting nothing that year from Trump personally or from his golf club.

Both Greenberg and Trump have declined to comment.

Several tax experts said that the two cases appeared to be clear cases of self-dealing, as defined by the tax code.

The Trump Foundation had made a donation, it seemed, so that a Trump business did not have to.

Rosemary E. Fei, a lawyer in San Francisco who advises nonprofits, said both cases clearly fit the definition of self-dealing.

“Yes, Trump pledged as part of the settlement to make a payment to a charity, and yes, the foundation is writing a check to a charity,” Fei said. “But the obligation was Trump’s. And you can’t have a charitable foundation paying off Trump’s personal obligations. That would be classic self-dealing.”

In another instance, from 2013, the Trump Foundation made a $5,000 donation to the D.C. Preservation League, according to the group and tax filings. That nonprofit’s support has been helpful for Trump as he has turned the historic Old Post Office Pavilion on Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue NW into a luxury hotel.

The Trump Foundation’s donation to that group bought a “sponsorship,” which included advertising space in the programs for three big events that drew Washington’s real estate elite. The ads did not mention the foundation or anything related to charity. Instead, they promoted Trump’s hotels, with glamorous photos and a phone number to call to make a reservation.

“The foundation wrote a check that essentially bought advertising for Trump hotels?” asked John Edie, the longtime general counsel for the Council on Foundations, when a Post reporter described this arrangement. “That’s not charity.”

The last of the four newly documented expenditures involves the second painting of Trump, which he bought with charity money.

It happened in 2014, during a gala at Mar-a-Lago that raised money forUnicorn Children’s Foundation — a Florida charity that helps children with developmental and learning disorders.

The gala’s main event was a concert by Jon Secada. But there was also an auction of paintings by Havi Schanz, a Miami Beach-based artist.

Trump with the painting that he bought. (Photo provided by Havi Schanz)

One was of Marilyn Monroe. The other was a four foot-tall portrait of Trump: a younger-looking, mid-’90s Trump, painted in acrylic on top of an old architectural drawing.

Trump bought it for $10,000.

Afterward, Schanz recalled in an email, “he asked me about the painting. I said, ‘I paint souls, and when I had to paint you, I asked your soul to allow me.’ He was touched and smiled.”

A few days later, the charity said, a check came from the Trump Foundation. Trump himself gave nothing, according to Sharon Alexander, the executive director of the charity.

Trump’s staff did not respond to questions about where that second painting is now. Alexander said she had last seen it at Trump’s club.

“I’m pretty sure we just left it at Mar-a-Lago,” she said, “and his staff took care of it.”

The website TripAdvisor provides another clue: On the page for Trump’s Doral golf resort, near Miami, users posted photos from inside the club. One of them appears to show Schanz’s painting, hanging on a wall at the resort. The date on the photo was February 2016.

Searching for evidence of Trump’s personal giving

No award for Malaysian PM’s wife, US-based NGO says

Malaysia's First Couple, Prime Minister Najib Razak and wife Rosmah Mansor. Pic: AP.

19th September 2016

THE flamboyant wife of Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak has been removed from the list of “Lead by example” honorary award recipients in what appears to be an embarrassing slip up by government officials and the country’s state-owned news agency.

It was earlier reported that Rosmah Mansor, 64, was slated to receive the award by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) in conjunction with the 71st United Nations General Assembly.

The announcement of the award came barely a week after Rosmah’s extravagant shopping habits was spotlighted again in the media, earning her widespread criticism.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) recently claimed to have obtained documents showing Rosmah as racking up some US$6 million in credit card charges between 2008 and 2015 to purchase expensive clothes, shoes and jewellery from London’s Harrods department store, Saks Fifth Avenue of New York, among other places.

The Washington-based Antiquities Coalition (AC), a non-governmental organization working to stop the looting and trafficking of antiquities — and which hands out the award — clarified Monday that the accolade and the event was not sanctioned by Unesco.

Andy Beck, a spokesperson from The Antiquities Coalition said reports that Rosmah was due to receive the award, at the “A Tribute to Heroes in the Global Campaign Against Violent Extremism” event on Sept 22 at the Metropolitan Museum of Arts, New York, was erroneous.

On Saturday, Malaysian national news agency Bernama carried a news report saying Rosmah was to be conferred the award in recognition of her efforts in developing the potential of children, especially through the Permata programme which she developed, and in which she is a patron.

According to MalaysiaKini, Beck, who issued the clarification to the media on Monday also shared a statement from Professor Tudor Parfitt, a British scholar, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and chair of the international academic advisory panel for the event.

“The committee recommended that Permata programmes receive recognition as they were seen to represent a model for potential imitation in other countries with diverse populations.

“The programme, which was founded in 2007 under the auspices of Rosmah Mansor, has already received recognition for its efforts to help deprived young people find employment and develop their potential,” Parfitt was quoted as saying.

Due to the leaks of the committee’s recommendations, Parfitt said several news outlets contacted the organisation to questioned the sources of funding for Permata.

SEE ALSO: Malaysia PM’s wife blew US$6m on clothes, shoes, and jewelry, WSJ claims

As academics, Parfitt said, the organisation had no immediate means of verifying funding for Permata, and was not aware of any specific wrongdoing.

“However, we do not wish this important event to be dominated by anything other than the issue of how to mobilise and unite people in the fight against violent extremism,” he said.

SEE ALSO: Malaysia: US says $1bn siphoned from 1MDB fund to finance gambling debts, private jet

“The committee therefore decided it requires more time to review the comments that have been received, and has removed Permata from the list of Thursday’s honourees.”

In a press statement on Saturday, Education Ministry secretary-general Alias Ahmad claimed the prestigious award was an initiative by Unesco and six outstanding women in the world who are involved in education, human rights, empowerment of women and advocates of global citizenship.

Anti-government dissidents in Malaysia have been campaigning long and hard against Najib, who they believe is corruptly involved in the 1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal. One of them is pro-democracy group Bersih 2.0, also known as the Coalition for Free and Fair Elections, which isplanning to hold a mass rally in Kuala Lumpur on Nov 19 to demand Najib’s resignation.

In July, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit seeking the seizure of more than US$1 billion in assets allegedly bought with money siphoned from 1MDB.

The lawsuit only named “Malaysian Official 1” and did not directly mention Najib but the prime minister’s critics believe it refers to him. Abdul Rahman Dahlan, a key leader in Najib’s ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition, recently told a BBC interview that “MO1” refers to Najib.