This is Trump Inc. from WNYC and ProPublica. I'm Ilya Maritz. We're calling this podcast

an open investigation. What that means is we show you our work, we share what we know,

and you dear listener are sending us tips and suggestions. We think it's a great way

to work, and we're not the only ones doing things this way. In 2016, when the Washington

Post assigned a reporter to fact check, then candidate Donald Trump's claims that he

gave a lot of money to charity, that reporter David Ferrenthold kept a pen and ink notebook,

and in that notebook, he won by one followed up with hundreds of charities tweeting out

his progress as he went. By the way, a lot of them said they never got a check from Trump.

And this method of sharing his progress led David Ferrenthold to some pretty bizarre stories.

Like the fact that in 2007, Donald Trump purchased a six foot tall portrait of himself at a fundraiser

for children's charity, and he paid for it with $20,000 from the Donald J. Trump Foundation.

Now Donald Trump is president, and David Ferrenthold, the reporter, has moved on to cover the ways in

which Trump may be profiting from the presidency. David, are you there? Here. Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. And I also have Eric Umanski from ProPublica here. Hey, Eric. Hello.

You guys also use lists as reporting tools sometimes, right? Yes, we also have readers help us with

our reporting. So here's how it's going to work today. We have been collecting questions from

listeners, questions that you, David, are uniquely qualified to answer, we think. And we're going to

hear some of those questions, read a couple of them from Twitter. But before we get into that,

I'm curious. Can you tell us about the best tip you've gotten since you started on the Trump beat?

You know, there's been a lot of great things we haven't been able to run down. My favorite one from

the last couple years since I've been covering the Trump organization was the tip that led me to this

fake time magazine cover that was hanging on the wall of a bunch of Donald Trump golf courses.

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