The issue that will get a few Donald Trump staffers jailed in 2017.

Veteran charity money shenanigans, of course. Short version: the Trump campaign reportedly collected six million bucks for veterans’ groups; only, nobody’s been able to trace more than half of that money being distributed, and it’s like three months later. The Daily Beast reports that New Hampshire state rep Al Baldasaro, Donald Trump’s campaign adviser for veteran’s affairs, doesn’t know and doesn’t care what happened to about the three million or so in missing charitable contributions. The exact quote is “I could ask, but it’s not high on my priority list.”

…Man, Trump can just pick ’em, huh? Normally you’d see more of a sense of self-preservation in a state representative*.  When you’ve inserted yourself into a publicity event – delivering over-sized checks to veterans’ groups, forsooth! – to the extent that Baldasaro has then you’d better be prepared to answer questions like “So, where’s the rest of the money?” and “When are the veterans’ groups getting the rest of that money?” and “No, seriously, where’s the rest of the money?” Because this is a really easy story to tell. It practically writes itself: Veterans’ charity money is MIA! Who’s to blame?  …Who, indeed?

And, at that, Al Baldasaro probably has to worry the least, because he’s not directly involved with the actual process where six million bucks of other people’s charity money somehow managed to settle in transit to about three million or so. No, the people who have to worry are the people who were actually involved in the money going away. And, let’s be honest?  If they had their hands on the money, it’d be disbursed already.  The fact that the Trump campaign didn’t powerfully argues that it screwed up somehow** and can’t disburse the money now, because they don’t really have it anymore.

Imagine how that’s gonna fly at the Justice Department. Particularly since there’s one thing you can say about the next Attorney General: to wit, that he or she will not be a Trump appointee. And since Trump will himself probably be spending the rest of his life in civil suits, probably rather bitterly, well…

Via @rumpfshaker.

Moe Lane

PS: Note that nowhere in this post is there any suggestion that Donald Trump would go to jail over this, even if others do. That’s because he won’t. He’s a rotten administrator, sure – but this money either got lost or stolen at a lower level than the one that Trump would personally oversee. I believe that the term of art is… “plausible deniability.”

PPS: Actually, people can totally go to jail over three million dollars’ worth of charity money ‘disappearing.’ And people have stolen far less. Not that I’m accusing anybody of stealing that money. Yet.

*No, really. Those folks have no margin of error at all.

**GASP.

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