Washington Post journalist asks Eric Trump if he lied to him in 2016 interview

An article from Forbes magazine to be published in its June 29 issue stated Trump may not have used his father’s golf course for free. The younger Trump had previously said he used his dad’s course for free for his fundraiser, allowing all the money to go to charity.

Forbes reported that it appears the money from the charity event may have gone to the Trump Organization instead of charity.

“In reviewing filings from the Eric Trump Foundation and other charities, it’s clear that the course wasn’t free — that the Trump Organization received payments for its use, part of more than $1.2 million that has no documented recipients past the Trump Organization,” the Forbes article states.

While investigating how much money Donald Trump verifiably donated to charity, Fahrenthold noticed in a tax filing that the Eric Trump Foundation had paid $87,665 to the Trump National Golf Club in Washington, D.C. and was named a “charge for the use of the golf club for the annual golf invitational.”

When Fahrenthold asked Trump about the payment, Trump told him that his father charged him “zero, zero” for the use of the golf course, according to a July 2016 Washington Post article.

“I just saw the Forbes story saying that your charity actually did pay your dad’s company for rental of the course in those past years,” Fahrenthold said in an email he sent to Trump and posted on Twitter on Tuesday. “That surprised me, since you had told me categorically – and repeatedly – last year that he’d allowed you to use the course for free, and that the payments listed on the Eric Trump Foundation’s 990s were just pass-throughs, in order to allow you to pay the other vendors more easily.”

Fahrenthold did not post Trump’s reply at press time, nor did he publish an article he tweeted that he was working on about the contradictory Forbes article.

Fahrenthold won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his coverage of the Trump campaign and investigating whether Donald Trump gave as much to charities as he claimed. He also first uncovered the infamous Access Hollywood video of Trump and Billy Bush speaking in vulgar terms about women.