In another case, the staff went beyond an accidental mistake and deliberately filed false information for a donor they couldn't identify, filling in the record with the address of a celebrity by the same name. It was later shown to be the former address of a bank that wired the money to the committee in the Tonellis' name.
The initial record also listed an empty construction lot in New Jersey as the Tonellis' address. John." John is the name of Tonelli's husband. Smaller errors included things such as reporting to the FEC that a donation of $400,000 from longtime GOP donor Isabel Tonelli instead came from someone named "Isabel T. I personally reviewed the submissions, and the database is still live and available here. Many of these discrepancies were uncovered with the help of volunteer fact-checkers who submitted their findings to a Google spreadsheet that I created in April 2017. Instead, the Trump inaugural committee's records contained hundreds of errors and mistakes, ranging from the accidental to the systemic to apparently covered up. But not just the typical errors one sees in federal campaign filings, such as a few misspelled donor names or incomplete information about donors.
The news reports did not identify any of the potential straw men by name.īut the first official report that the Trump inaugural committee filed with the Federal Election Commission in April 2017 was riddled with errors. Foreign nationals and governments are prohibited from donating to presidential inaugural funds, the same way they are prohibited from donating to U.S. Prosecutors are also reportedly probing whether some of the listed donors to the inaugural fund were actually just fronts, or "straw men," for money that was really coming from foreign governments. Eight years earlier, Obama had held 10 official balls for his inauguration, while in 2001 Bush held eight official balls for his inauguration. In 2017, Trump held only three official inaugural balls. The committee then spent nearly all of this money, $104 million, on far fewer official events than Obama or Bush had held.
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