It wasn't until the second half of my first year that I realized you have to try to make friends and meet people at Harvard; the chances don't come to you.
— David Fahrenthold
Millions of people would give literally anything to get their kids into a school like Harvard, and millions more simple admire it as another, brighter world.
What's a good metaphor for a Harvard student? A talking, gold-plated pile of manure, wearing a fleece.
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.
When bills come in, Medicare get so many bills every day, it pays most of them and then goes back later to figure out if they were fraudulent, if it ever goes back at all.
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.
If you're the president of a charity, you can't take the money out of the charity and use it to buy things for yourself. And you can't take the money out of the charity and use it to buy things for your business.
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.
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.
Because of a jury-rigged and outdated system meant to track deaths, the government has trouble determining exactly which Americans are deceased.
Trump is a really complicated story and a difficult candidate to write about.
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.
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.
In 1996, Trump had crashed a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a charity opening a nursery school for children with AIDS. Trump, who had never donated to the charity, stole a seat onstage that had been saved for a big contributor.
You need a lot of money to become president.
If you have $1 billion, you can use the Clinton Foundation as a conduit, and as it goes by, Clinton gives it his prestige.
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 promise not to take my thousands of dollars in student loan debt and move to Mexico. At least not right away.
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.
Many graduates, moving often in the first years of their post-college life, simply forget to update their addresses with Harvard, and so bills go unanswered and uncollected. This is called a 'technical default.'
You could be a corrupt doctor, but at least you have to go to the medical school first. Right?
It's so hard to cover Trump. What Trump says, what he feels, what he thinks changes from day to day.
There's two sides to Trump's character, at least his pre-presidential character. One was, 'I'm the richest man you could possibly imagine, I live the life of Scrooge McDuck.' The other side was, 'I need your money. Give me money.'
If you have Trump avoiding income tax and money coming in, and then he's still able to control it and use it as if it was his income to help his interests, then you're starting to see a bigger legal problem.
Don't focus on what Trump says. Focus on the results of his actions. Stay in your lane and focus on one particular area.
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.
There are some things about Trump's foundation and charity that I really want to know. I worry there may not be enough time to figure it all out.
I am not going to argue about whether I am a nasty guy.
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.
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?
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.
The perception a lot of folks have of the Clintons, even folks who are Democrats, see the Clintons as bending the rules.
The federal helium program sells vast amounts of the gas to U.S. companies that use it in everything from party balloons to MRI machines. If the government stops, no one else is ready.
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.
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 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.
Financial Aid Office (FAO) administrators are scrambling to educate students on repaying loans, but a disparity in knowledge persists.
Miami is the place where all great Medicare fraud schemes come from. It has a great concentration of professional criminals and old people.
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.
There is a way to tell the truth about you without you; it's just a lot more work.
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 called me a 'nasty guy' on the phone, and some of his surrogates called me 'obsessed' and biased on TV.
The U.S. government has a problem with dead people. For one thing, it pays them way too much money.
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.
If your selling access to somebody who is a future president or current secretary of state, or if there's an implication that you are, that matters.
Some courts have said moving an employee to a basement or closet usually amounts to punishment. But others have said this is a decision that should be made case by case. How nice is the basement office? How big is the closet?
'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.
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.
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.
All of philanthropy is harnessing that urge to have your name on something, and using it for good.
