David Fahrenthold at the Washington Post last week:

Donald Trump paid the IRS a $2,500 penalty this year, an official at Trump’s company said, after it was revealed that Trump’s charitable foundation had violated tax laws by giving a political contribution to a campaign group connected to Florida’s attorney general.

The improper donation, a $25,000 gift from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, was made in 2013. At the time, Attorney General Pam Bondi was considering whether to investigate fraud allegations against Trump University. She decided not to pursue the case.

Sigh. Trump gave the Attorney General money, and she dropped the investigation into fraud allegations against his fraudulent not-university. Why isn’t this an issue?

The sequence began when Bondi herself solicited a donation from Trump. That solicitation was reported this year by the Associated Press. That request came as Bondi was considering allegations that Trump University — a real estate seminar business — had defrauded customers in Florida.

Let me get this straight. She was the Attorney General. She was considering fraud allegations against Trump’s ridiculous “university.” She asked him for money.

He gave her the money. She dropped the case.

How is that not obviously grossly corrupt? What is the matter with everyone?

Paul Waldman did a piece for the Post on Trump’s corruption yesterday, which is where I saw the link to the Farenthold piece.

In the heat of a presidential campaign, you’d think that a story about one party’s nominee giving a large contribution to a state attorney general who promptly shut down an inquiry into that nominee’s scam “university” would be enormous news. But we continue to hear almost nothing about what happened between Donald Trump and Florida attorney general Pam Bondi.

…The story re-emerged last week when The Post’s David A. Fahrenthold reported that Trump paid a penalty to the IRS after his foundation made an illegal contribution to Bondi’s PAC. While the Trump organization characterizes that as a bureaucratic oversight, the basic facts are that Bondi’s office had received multiple complaints from Floridians who said they were cheated by Trump University; while they were looking into it and considering whether to join a lawsuit over Trump University filed by the attorney general of New York State, Bondi called Trump and asked him for a $25,000 donation; shortly after getting the check, Bondi’s office dropped the inquiry.

Maybe it was all just a mistake, Waldman says, but we can’t tell, because nobody is digging into it.

And the comparison with stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails or the Clinton Foundation is extremely instructive. Whenever we get some new development in any of those Clinton stories, you see blanket coverage — every cable network, every network news program, every newspaper investigates it at length. And even when the new information serves to exonerate Clinton rather than implicate her in wrongdoing, the coverage still emphasizes that the whole thing just “raises questions” about her integrity.

There are lots of reporters covering the Clinton stories all the time; Trump not so much.

When it comes to Trump, on the other hand, we’ve seen a very different pattern. Here’s what happens: A story about some kind of corrupt dealing emerges, usually from the dogged efforts of one or a few journalists; it gets discussed for a couple of days; and then it disappears. Someone might mention it now and again, but the news organizations don’t assign a squad of reporters to look into every aspect of it, so no new facts are brought to light and no new stories get written.

The end result of this process is that because of all that repeated examination of Clinton’s affairs, people become convinced that she must be corrupt to the core. It’s not that there isn’t plenty of negative coverage of Trump, because of course there is, but it’s focused mostly on the crazy things he says on any given day.

But the truth is that you’d have to work incredibly hard to find a politician who has the kind of history of corruption, double-dealing, and fraud that Donald Trump has. The number of stories which could potentially deserve hundreds and hundreds of articles is absolutely staggering. Here’s a partial list:

• Trump’s casino bankruptcies, which left investors holding the bag while he skedaddled with their money
• Trump’s habit of refusing to pay contractors who had done work for him, many of whom are struggling small businesses
• Trump University, which includes not only the people who got scammed and the Florida investigation, but also a similar story from Texas where the investigation into Trump U was quashed.
• The Trump Institute, another get-rich-quick scheme in which Trump allowed a couple of grifters to use his name to bilk people out of their money
• The Trump Network, a multi-level marketing venture(a.k.a. pyramid scheme) that involved customers mailing in a urine sample which would be analyzed to produce for them a specially formulated package of multivitamins
• Trump Model Management, which reportedly had foreign models lie to customs officials and work in the U.S. illegally, and kept them in squalid conditions while they earned almost nothing for the work they did
• Trump’s employment of foreign guest workers at his resorts, which involves a claim that he can’t find Americans to do the work
• Trump’s use of hundreds of undocumented workers from Poland in the 1980s, who were paid a pittance for their illegal work
• Trump’s history of being charged with housing discrimination

And there’s more! I’ve blogged about some of that list, trying to do my little bit to boost the exposure of those stories…but, I admit, I blog more about the gruesome things he says.

Maybe journalists are thinking it’s “fair and balanced” this way? Clinton isn’t the hateful racist shithead that Trump is, so to be fair and even things out they blow up her emails and speaking fees to match the size of his shitheadism? While mostly ignoring his horrendous business practices over the past forty years? People shafted right and left? In other words Trump is vastly worse than she is in multiple areas, so they help him out by neglecting most of his bad shit – to make it fair and balanced.

Sick, isn’t it.