Post distorts outcome of 2018 lawsuit involving Trump family charity | Fact check

Sudiksha Kochi, USA TODAY
·4 min read
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Donald Trump with his children in 2014. From left, Eric, Donald Jr. and Ivanka.
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The claim: Trump's children were forced to attend a class and barred from operating a charity after being caught stealing from foundation

A July 3 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) shows a screenshot of a tweet from liberal activist Jeff Tiedrich about some of former President Donald Trump's children.

"hey, remember when Hunter Biden got caught stealing from his own fake foundation and was forbidden from ever operating a charity again and a court forced him to attend a class on 'how not to steal'?" reads the post. "oh wait, that wasn't Hunter Biden, that was Don Jr., Ivanka and the idiot who eats library paste."

The post generated over 5,000 likes in less than a week, and the tweet accumulated over 25,000 likes.

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Our rating: Partly false

The claim is referencing a 2018 lawsuit that alleged Donald Trump and his children unlawfully used funds from the Donald J. Trump Foundation to further business and political interests. It is true that Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. were forced to attend a court-mandated class as part of an agreement to resolve the lawsuit. However, they weren’t forbidden from operating a charity as the post claims.

Post distorts outcome of a 2018 case involving the Trump family

In 2018, then-New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood filed a lawsuit against the Donald J. Trump Foundation and its board members: Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump. The lawsuit alleged the foundation’s funds were misused for Donald Trump’s personal, political and business interests in violation of both federal and state laws, and that its board members engaged in "willful self-dealing transactions."

To resolve the lawsuit, the foundation dissolved its operations and distributed its remaining assets to other nonprofits, according to a 2019 court motion. Donald Trump was also ordered to pay $2 million in damages.

But contrary to the post’s claim, the Trump family was not barred from operating another charity, according to Bradley Moss, a national security lawyer.

The lawsuit originally asked to prohibit Donald Trump from serving as “an officer, director or trustee” of any charitable organization for 10 years and his children for one year.

However, a final settlement between both parties said that if Donald Trump decided to serve as an officer or director of a pre-existing charitable organization, he must − among other things − have independent board members, provide annual reports to the attorney general for five years and engage the services of an accounting firm to monitor expenses.

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“His children were not subject to these restrictions, but it may be because the board had not met from 1998 to 2018, so it was only a ‘board’ on paper,” Joan Meyer, a partner at the law firm Thompson Hine, told USA TODAY in an email.

The post is correct that Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. had to take court-mandated board training sessions “pertaining to charitable organizations and the fiduciary responsibilities of those organizations’ directors and officers,” according to the court motion.

A similar claim, alleging that the Trump family was barred from operating any charity after stealing from a kid’s cancer charity, circulated in 2019. That claim was based on a 2017 Forbes story that reported the Eric Trump Foundation said it would donate all proceeds from an annual golf tournament to the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital but diverted some of those funds to other charities, many of which were connected to Trump family members or interests, and for other expenses.

But while the office of then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said it was looking into the Forbes story, there are no credible reports that the office or any court has forbidden the Trump family from operating a charity.

USA TODAY reached out to the social media users who shared the claim for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Post distorts 2018 lawsuit involving Trump family | Fact check