Are you gonna run for president . I think i just got an f from you actually. This is over. David fahrenthold welcome. Great to be here so a reporter in 2016, who people like and admire laughs youre like half unicorn, half bigfoot. It wont last. No it couldnt possibly be. Were not in a business that people like or admire very much these days. Were kind of between child molesters and irs investigators, right . The journalism business has seen better times. Right worse than Congress Actually right. What happened . How did we get here . How did we get to such a low ebb . What did we do wrong . I thought we were doing the peoples work . Well theres a lot of us in the business right. Some of us do it well. Some of us do it poorly. But mostly were a good foil for everybody right . Politicians on both sides see us as when things arent going their way they find its a convenient way to blame us. Right but the public believes them. They can blame us all they want but the public actually seems receptive to this idea. Right and also when people read the news or watch the news the part that they agree with the regard as just right. How hard was it to find what was true . When they dont agree with something then they blame you. They blame us the facts are the facts. Right if they disagree with the facts they blame us. Does it make you less apt to do the work you do . No no not at all. In fact i have to say im kind of a counter example. This year ive had a really Good Relationship with readers, a really Good Relationship with the public. Right the abuse has not been nearly as bad as it has been for other people. Only from the people you cover. Yeah and not even that much from them. One of the weird things about trump is i dont even get abused that much by them. They just ignored me a lot are you offended . Wait a minute. Hes attacking other people, why wont he attack me right . I did not think that. laughs you know its funny. Throughout a lot of this Campaign Trump would go after individual reporters by name and and occasionally the post occasionally the post and he banned us from covering him for a long time. But hes never actually tweeted about me. And i blame the fact that my last name is hard to spell for the fact that some other people dont abuse me. audience laughs i think they abuse congressman Blake Farenthold who has a slightly easier to spell version of my name. He attacked the congressman thats it were gonna go back and look this up right now. Maybe they blame him instead. So you worked for the post, youve worked for the post for 16 years yes its been your one employer out of college. Right right . Thats right and youve covered congress, youve covered d. C. City government, youve covered the bureaucracy, d. C. Police the environment. You did all that sort of stuff, right . Youve covered a range of things. But never a president ial before. Well i had done a little bit of the 2012 campaign, in which the highlight of my 2012 experience was that i found a man in New Hampshire who took his goat to meet all the candidates audience laughs . Okay, great and you remember John Huntsman then. John huntsman spent like a thousand days in New Hampshire and nobody liked him anyway. He put all of his chips on that square. And nobody liked him except for the goat guy and that was because his goat had bit John Huntsman and huntsman was totally cool about it. And that was the one committed huntsman voter i met this is like the last five minutes of every local newscast right . The Human Interest story right the goat story so that was like your only nothing like 2016 this was really the first big president ial. How do you get on the trump beat if youre at the post. Youve got a news room full of big stars. I mean this is not, i look at the posts work over this campaign and i think the post did the best work of any journalism organization. No close second and it was almost to a person, dan balls, karen tumulty, robert costa katie zezima. You go down the list, rebecca sinderbrand. Everybody at the post did amazing work. You were one of many. Yes how do you throw elbows and crowd yourself on to that team . Well it kind of happened by accident. I spent 2015 covering, i dont like parts of political journalism where youre one of 100 people following a candidate around. I wanted to be the one person doing the story i was doing. So that meant covering basically losers last year. So i spent a lot of last year writing about people who had no chance because i just thought they were interesting. So rick perry. Actually when i flew to see rick perry give a speech, to start a profile of him, he dropped out in the middle of the speech that i saw him give. Youre like the Sports Illustrated cover curse, right . Its like a mummys curse. If touch you die. Youre dead. So it meant that by the time we got to iowa, all the people i had covered, santorum, pataki, gilmore, they were all gone. So they sent me to follow trump around. To write a story. Basically the oh my god were they trying to kill him is that what they were trying to do . No. It was supposed to be donald trump may actually win the iowa caucuses. Religious conservative iowa, donald trump the three time married mogul might win. So they sent me to follow him around in a caucus state. And im in waterloo, iowa watching trump give a rally. And trump stops the rally in the middle and says, come on up here people from this local waterloo veterans organization. Im going to give you a check. Thats something id never seen before. He gives them this giant Golf Tournament sized check like a novelty check yeah it says donald j. Trump foundation on the top make America Great again on the bottom. Its for 100,000. So he gives them this check and they say thank you and he goes back to the rally. So hes using his charity basically, as a prop in his political rally. If you remember a few days earlier, trump had held this big fundraiser for veterans in iowa right skipped the Republican Debate i think he said he had 6 million. Said he raised 6 million total and that 1 million of it was his. So i see him give this big check to people and i dont know anything about charities but i know you cant do that. Theres a law. Theres a law that says that nonprofits like the donald j. Trump foundation can not get involved in political campaigns. To me i thought what clearer evidence could there be that hes using his charity as a prop . So that was one thing that i was interested in. The other thing was i saw him give out these big novelty checks and then he stopped. And hed only given out about 1 million. And he said hed raised six. So wheres the rest of the money. So i came back. I had no candidates to cover because all my other candidates were dead and i thought alright, why dont i just spend a couple of days and figure out what happened to the rest of the money. Figure out if trump broke the law and figure out what happened to the rets. Did you do this on your own or did you go to an editor at the paper and say i want to chase this . This part was basically on my own because i didnt think i was assigning myself something for nine months. I thought i was assigning myself, so a skunk work and if then it made, you go to your bosses and say look what ive got. Yeah and thought theres no way, i thought i would call the Trump Campaign and they would say oh yeah, heres the rest of the money. Because who would ever stiff veterans in the middle of a president ial campaign . Who would say ive raised 6 million and then not give it out. So of course they must have given it out. So i started calling them and calling veterans groups to try to figure where the money went and it wasnt a couple of days. It wasnt an easy question to answer. That was february first that i saw him give the check out. It took me until the end of may to get them to cough up where the rest of the money was. So did the Trump Campaign not respond to you when you made initial calls . They responded to me a little bit along the way. By the beginning of march we knew where about half the money was but they said okay were not gonna tell you any more. And through all this was trump had said on the stage, im gonna give a Million Dollars of my own money, in addition to this money i had collected from other people, one of the six million is mine. Well where was that . That was the part that i was most concerned about. Thats the money he has the most control over. I asked questions, i couldnt figure out the answer. Until something really interesting happened. At the end of may i get a phone call from corey lewandowski, who was Trumps Campaign manager at the time. And he says mr. Trump has given out his Million Dollars to veterans. But i cant tell you who he gave it to or when or how or in what amounts. Its all secret. Except for fact that you should just know absolutely he has given money. Take our word for it. Take our word for it. But i didnt want to take their word for it. This is a Huge Campaign promise. Im not gonna just take their word for it. So i said okay how can i figure this out . In the old days you just would have to call all eight zillion veterans organizations. Youd never really be sure that he hadnt given it out. But now theres twitter. And theres a way to put out these requests in a way that a lot of people will see it and that trump will see it. This is one of the amazing parts. In some ways your reporting over the course of the story was as modern and as tech forward as it could have been and in some ways it was literally ink on paper as old school as it could have been. But the tech forward part was you used social media, twitter specifically. To essentially crowdsource the information that you were trying to get from these guys. Thats right. So i thought the veterans Philanthropy Community is not huge. So i could tweet to veterans of foreign wars, disabled american veterans, and other groups that deal with veterans in a way that not only the National Press corp could see, because theyre all on twitter. Trump could see because im putting his handle on the tweet. And the idea was okay im gonna ask all these people hey did you get any of this Million Dollars donald trump gave out . But even if they didnt, someone else might see it and say hey you didnt ask us but we got money. So maybe you wouldnt find the whole iceberg but youd find the tip of the iceberg. And maybe trump would see it and respond in a way that would give us more details. Yeah so i spent a day tweeting and accomplished nothing. I learned nothing. The people all responded saying they hadnt gotten the money. I thought this is a huge waste of time. But trump saw. And it turned out that actually when lewandowski told me that hed given away his Million Dollars that was completely wrong. That was totally false. The money was still in trumps pocket. It was only after my day of tweeting at all these groups and looking for the money that trump actually did give the Million Dollars, all in one fell swoop, to a group that hed known for years. Now we should say that although this was the current year and this wouldnt have been available yet. In previous years when youre investigating somebodys Charitable Giving, which you eventually did do over time, you would simply have tax returns available. Tax returns would be a helpful primary source document. But in this case we didnt have, and still dont have, trumps tax returns. In previous years clinton , anybody whod run for office previously had released their personal tax returns. Which would show what theyd given. If you were investigating somebody elses Charitable Giving you would have it right there on paper. It wouldnt be much of an investigation. It wouldnt take any time to resolve. In this case trump calls me and says okay ive given this Million Dollars. He personally calls you. He called. This is the last time i talked to him. Stop. I gotta know about this. This is actually interesting. Because he may have you killed at some point. So i want to ask you while i still can. So he calls the post switchboard . What does he do . Does he call your cell phone . Well no i had been asking all along to talk to him. And in the past you could just call him. Like when i had written stories about him in the summer of 2015, you could just call his cell phone and get him. Now as he rose in the polls it was harder to get a hold of him. But i had been asking okay, have him call me. So he did. This is the last time we talked. He called me and he said yes ive given the Million Dollars away. Long after lewandowski said he already had. I said did you only give it now because i was asking about it . He said youre a really nasty guy. You just a nasty guy. Just for asking that question . Yeah he didnt answer the question. It was the strangest interview because then im not gonna argue with him about whether im a nasty person, but i had other questions that i wanted him to answer. What happened to the other money that other donors gave you to give away . Where is that . The other five million. The other five million. So im not just gonna argue with him so he would say oh youre a nasty guy, youre terrible. I would go back and ask a factual question. He would reset. He would give some factual answer which would then devolve into more insults of me and then wed go back again. So the strangest interview. But that was the last time i talked to him. We talked then, i wrote the story. So at what point did you decide to expand your focus from that specific 6 million to all Charitable Giving by donald trump . It was after that. So trump after he called me, he had this angry press conference at trump tower where he described giving away the rest of the money that people had entrusted him just for the veterans thing. Remember he called the media a piece of work and insulted people. Then marty barron, our executive editor said why dont you look at all his Charitable Giving. Basically if hes willing to play fast and loose with money for veterans in the middle of a republican president ial primary, has he been keeping his promises before when basically nobody was looking . Right and at that point you broke out the big chief tablet. We actually wondered what was it . Is it a notepad . Was it a notebook . Because the museum ought to have your, whatever this thing was that you wrote on. It was a legal pad. So i though okay now, the question then became trump over his lifetime had promised to give tens of millions of dollars away. He has this weird dichotomy where hes always telling you how rich he is. Hes so rich he doesnt need more money. Hes so rich. Like thats the first word of the art of the deal. Im so rich i couldnt use any more money. But yet hes always hustling for more money. Hes trying to sell you steaks or classes, the gold plated make America Great hats for christmas right i got an email probably today about that. Right so hes always like this guy who says i dont need more money but hes always hustling for your money. Well how does he suqre that . Its always well its for charity. Trump university, the profits going to Charity Charity trump water, going to charity. He told howard stern all the money for the apprentice, 2. 5 million a year, was going to charity. But no proof of that. No proof of that. So lets try to find again, the tip of the iceberg. So trump wouldnt help me at all and i thought well why dont i just make a list of the charities i think are most likely to have gotten money out of trumps own pocket. Ill just call them. Ill go down the list how long was the initial list . The initial list was a couple of hundred. When i wrote it down it was a couple hundred. And then i kept expanding it. Thinking maybe he would call and volunteer and tell me something or maybe somebody else would know something. So i started writing it down on a legal pad and taking pictures of it, putting it on twitter. Putting it on twitter the idea being that you can get a lot more information into a picture than you can into a tweet yeah i wrote out the ones where they said never, hed never given them money in one color ink. So you could see visually, how hard im trying and how many places had said no weve never gotten his money. Right. And did the organizations you called respond in most cases quickly or at all . Were some reluctant to cross trump . What was the story there . Almost everybody responded. So it started to grow and people started coming to me with things that i didnt even know i was looking for. I started out not really knowing what was legal and illegal in the world of charity. And also not really understanding this was not your area of expertise before. It is now. To the degree that i had an area of expertise no this was definitely not it. Just as an example of how this all turned so fast. I get a call one day, after id been out there doing this stuff for a while, from somebody in the palm beach area code. Somebody i dont know. Trump owns the mar a lago club in palm beach. The person says havi art trump. Havi art trump. Okay that sounds like nonsense. Almost all the time you get a tip like that its useless. But this was the perfect situation. I googled that and immediately found a portrait of trump. This is the famous six foot portrait . This is another portrait. A second portrait. This is the second portrait. The six foot portrait we knew about already. Thats the one he paid 20,000 for out of his charity. Out of foundation money. Right. I still never found that one. As a brief aside on that. I think youll enjoy this. I get a picture of the six foot tall portrait. This was painted by a speed painter in five minutes. Trump paid 20,000 for it. Its a picture of trumps face. Its sort of his normal skin tone but done in kind of a neony sort of way. We get a picture of it but we couldnt get the rights to use it. So im thinking okay ill put this into google image search and itll show me another place. Maybe its hanging on the wall in the background of somebodys prom picture or