As Trump rises in polls, his foes say it’s time he got properly scrutinized

Now, they said, it’s time to demand some transparency from Trump on more serious issues: his taxes, his foreign financial relationships and on potential conflicts of interest between his business and presidential duties.

“Donald Trump is the least transparent presidential candidate in modern history,” Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, told a media conference call.

“There are 54 days to go before election day. It is simply appalling that we don’t know more about the depth of the foreign business dealings of the man running to be president. … What bad news is Trump hiding?”

The Clinton campaign demanded that he release his tax returns, as she’s done for the last 38 years, list his foreign financial interests and sever his ties to his company, as the Clintons promise to do with their charitable foundation by having close friends and family withdraw.

It seized on comments from one of Trump’s children to make the case.

Donald Trump Jr. suggested to a Pittsburgh newspaper that avoiding political controversy was the real motivation for not releasing the tax returns — an explanation at odds with Trump’s blaming the non-disclosure on an ongoing audit: “He’s got a 12,000-page tax return that would create … financial auditors out of every person in the country asking questions that would detract from (his) main message.”

Another Clinton adviser fumed at the double standard.

“The rip I get from the media and from Republicans is, ‘Oh, Hillary’s secretive’,” Paul Begala told CNN. “She’s released 30 doggone years of tax returns. … Trump has released zilch-point-nada. Yet we have this false equivalency between the two candidates.”

After 17 months of controversy over Clinton’s emails, family financial ties, and conflicts-of-interest, the Democratic campaign is pointing to what it describes as far more significant problems on the other side:

—Conflicts of interest. Clinton has been clobbered over speaking fees from Wall Street, which have been an issue since the primaries. But her campaign suggests Trump’s staggering array of possible conflicts have gone mostly ignored. A Newsweek article this week points to Trump’s partnerships with friends or enemies of various foreign governments. The article suggested they’d cloud his international relations in South Asia, Europe and the Middle East.

Trump says his children would run his empire if he were president. By way of comparison, Bill and Chelsea Clinton and some close family friends promise to withdraw from various roles at their family charity and scale down its activities.

—Pay-to-play. Media have run numerous stories on donors to the Clinton charity, asking whether they got favourable treatment from the State Department when she ran it. Now Democrats are demanding a federal bribery probe into a $25,000 donation from the Trump Foundation. It went to a group working on the re-election of Florida’s attorney-general Pam Bondi — just as Bondi was weighing whether her state would join a New York fraud case against Trump University. Trump has already paid a $2,500 fine for violating tax rules regarding political contributions from charities.

—Financial irregularities. Few media have explored the spending of Trump’s family charity. One news organization, the Washington Post, has run stories about how Trump personally benefited from donations to it. For example, the Post said, it used charity money to buy a $20,000, six-foot-tall portrait of Trump — then hung it at one of his golf courses.

The paper also said it gathered other people’s donations and gave them to a leukemia charity, among others. Trump got credit as the donor and later drew revenue from the charity as it rented out his Florida mansion to the leukemia charity for an event.

New York’s attorney general says he’s opened an investigation into the Trump foundation for criminal self-dealing. Trump allies have responded by calling the attorney general, Democrat Eric Schneiderman, a partisan hack.

Clinton’s allies have also fumed at media for failing to call out Trump’s sudden shifts on policy — offering details that either contradict each other, change frequently, or are practically unfeasible.

Yet he’s on the march. National polls are virtually tied. In Florida and Ohio, the latest surveys show him slightly ahead.

Trump began a policy speech to the Economic Club of New York by bragging about those polls Thursday.

“The polls are coming out. We’re leading in so many polls, I can’t tell you, I don’t know where to begin,” Trump said.

“But that’s a good feeling.”

Alexander Panetta, The Canadian Press

As Trump rises in polls, his foes say it’s time he got properly scrutinized

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