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In theory, it is illegal to make the basement into a bureaucratic purgatory. In 1994, for instance, Congress prohibited agencies from making significant changes in a whistleblower's 'working conditions' as punishment for speaking out.
Marty Baron, 'The Post's executive editor, stopped me in the elevator lobby late one debate night and suggested we look into the Trump Foundation specifically. I also became interested in researching Trump's broader history of charity.
There are two main organizations that rate charities. They look at their finances and decide whether they are giving enough to the causes they claim to focus on. Something like 80 or 90% of their money actually goes to a charitable purpose.
We Harvard students live in a tourist attraction with movie stars and geniuses; we're recognized on all continents as the creme of the brulee, the syrup on the pancakes of greatness. Yet most of us complain like vegans at a barbecue cook-off.
So much about Trump is... mysterious and slippery. Everything in his business record, you had to ask him for the details. He made himself the only source. He would either not tell you, or he was often an unreliable narrator about his own life.
I personally can barely remember what I was like before I came to college, what made me happy or worried or confident. I don't remember what I expected in my future, except that 'President of the United States' was about halfway up the ladder.
The Trump Foundation's tax returns are public. That's one thing. So we can look through them in a way that we can't look through his personal tax returns. They're publicly available going back to the beginning of the foundation, which is 1987.
Federal election laws bar candidates from the 'personal use' of campaign donations - a ban meant to stop candidates from buying things unrelated to their runs for office. If a purchase is a result of campaign activity, the government allows it.
Trump was on WrestleMania in 2007. And in that year and 2009, the McMahons gave a total of $5 million. Now, we know that wasn't Trump's payment for WrestleMania. He got paid separately, but about the same time, they made this $5 million donation.
'The Post' is a fairly fusty place when it comes to profanity. If a reporter tries to get a bad word into a story, the word is usually forwarded to top editors, who consider it with the gravity and speed that the Vatican applies to candidates for sainthood.
Even when he was just a reality-TV star, Trump was the kind of star who got a cover story in 'Time.' But that wasn't true. The 'Time' cover is a fake. There was no 1 March 2009 issue of 'Time' magazine. And there was no issue at all in 2009 that had Trump on the cover.
In the past, whistleblowers have had their desks moved to break rooms, broom closets, and basements. It's a clever punishment, good-government activists say, that exploits a gray area in the law. The whole thing can look minor on paper. They moved your office. So what?
In five cases, the Trump Foundation told the IRS that it had given a gift to a charity whose leaders told 'The Post' that they had never received it. In two other cases, companies listed as donors to the Trump Foundation told 'The Post' that those listings were incorrect.
Things live and die, and then someone processes them into edible portions. This is a complete telling of the story, 'Food.' The basic plot hasn't changed for centuries. I shouldn't need to know any more details, any more history, in order to decide if my food tastes good or not.
I read the collected works of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and made a list of everything the old Baptist preacher had ever condemned as immoral or untoward. The subjects of his condemnation ranged from college-age women going braless to dogs wearing clothes to Beyonce.
Donald Trump was in a tuxedo, standing next to his award: a statue of a palm tree, as tall as a toddler. It was 2010, and Trump was being honored by a charity - the Palm Beach Police Foundation - for his 'selfless support' of its cause. His support did not include any of his own money.
The task of tracking deaths for the federal bureaucracy is an enormous one; about 2.5 million Americans die each year. Federal officials say the vast majority of these cases are handled correctly: The death is recorded. Government money is no longer sent to that person. But not always.
The federal government requires that its loans be paid back within 10 years of graduation, and Harvard has pegged its loans to the same 10-year timetable. Yet despite Harvard's low default rate, the idea of years of loan debt is daunting for some students even before it's time to pay back.
A lot of other wealthy people feel the responsibility to take some of the wealth they've been given and give back: to give a lot of money to a particular cancer charity or to a group researching some particular disease or their alma mater. We haven't really found anything like that with Trump.
The point of my stories was not to defeat Trump. The point was to tell readers the facts about this man running for president. How reliable was he at keeping promises? How much moral responsibility did he feel to help those less fortunate than he? By the end of the election, I felt I'd done my job.
So many rich people, when they get into philanthropy, they have one thing they like, or several things they focus on. They pick a disease or a college or some kind of non-profit. They produce good results through that cause, but also they get recognized; there's some sort of monument to what they did.
I feel like I understand Trump's character better than the average person now, having seen all of these little interactions with charity. I wanted to keep doing something that's like that, and not just doing pure politics. So my piece of the Trump empire is the golf courses, Mar-a-Lago, and the winery.
The Trump campaign generally does not respond at all to my requests for information - either requests for broader data on Trump's charitable giving or narrow requests for information about specific subjects, like the $20,000 portrait of himself that Trump seems to have purchased with money from his charity.
The Trump people make it extremely hard to figure out what's going on with their businesses, so we've done things like try to figure out all the people, the charities who rented out ballrooms and hotel rooms, all the NBA teams that stay at his hotels, people that pay him a lot of money and have other choices.
The trouble with dead people often begins with something called the Death Master File, which is kept by the Social Security Administration. Every day, new reports are added, provided by relatives, funeral homes, and the state agencies that issue official death certificates. The list contains 90 million reports.
Once money goes into a charity, it is tax exempt, so that's a benefit you get. And in return, you have to use the assets of the charity to serve the public good. So if Trump is using this money basically to save his businesses, the money isn't helping people. That's a violation of the letter and the spirit of law.
If I'm owed money, but I say, 'Don't pay me, pay my cousin. Don't pay me, pay my charity,' you can do that, but then the IRS requires that you pay income tax on that. It's your income if you earned it and you directed where it went. If you exercised control over where the money went, you have to pay income tax on that.
Trump started his foundation in 1987 to give away the proceeds from his book 'The Art of the Deal.' It has no paid employees and a board of five: Trump, three of his children, and a longtime Trump Organization employee. They all work a half-hour per week, according to the foundation's most recent Internal Revenue Service filing.
The biggest correlation you find is with Trump's own personal and business interests. He lives in Palm Beach part of the year, where charity galas are a big part of the life. And he runs a club in Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago, that depends a lot on being rented out by charities, who can pay as much as $275,000 per night to rent out his club.
For me, the thing that is different about Trump is that you don't realize it, and I didn't realize it, but there is a rhythm that the political press - including myself - expects people to show in terms of embarrassing statements or shameful acts. And that is spinning it away and finally being forced to apologize, and then apologize again.