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Judge Rejects Bid To Toss Trump University Lawsuit

Judge Rejects Bid To Toss Trump University Lawsuit

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) – A U.S. judge on Friday tentatively rejected Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s bid to dismiss a lawsuit by Trump University students who said they were defrauded through its real-estate seminars.

U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel in San Diego told a hearing he would take under consideration arguments on both sides in the case and issue a written ruling in the coming weeks.

The 2013 lawsuit, one of three over the defunct Trump University venture, was filed on behalf of students who paid up to $35,000 to learn Trump’s real estate investing “secrets” from his “hand-picked” instructors. The plaintiffs have sought class-action status.

The cases against Trump University have regularly cropped up during the presidential campaign. Trump was roundly criticized in May when he accused Curiel, who is of Mexican descent, of being biased against him because of the candidate’s pledge to build a border wall between the United States and Mexico.

Curiel, who was born in Indiana, is presiding over two of the cases, with one set for trial in late November. A separate lawsuit by New York’s attorney general is pending in that state.

Trump’s lawyers say Curiel should toss the 2013 California lawsuit on the grounds that the New York real estate mogul, though personally involved in developing the concept and curriculum, relied on other executives to manage Trump University by the time the plaintiffs purchased their seminars.

“By 2007, his involvement was fairly minimal. He was not the person running this company. He founded it, he established it and he went off and let other people run it. It’s like any other celebrity endorsement,” Trump attorney Daniel Petrocelli said during the hearing.

Trump’s lawyers claim references in marketing materials to “secrets,” “hand-picked” instructors or “university” were mere sales “puffery.” According to the defense, there is no evidence Trump intended to defraud students.

Lawyers for the students say the wealthy developer conducted the marketing for Trump University more than anyone else, starring in and approving promotional materials.

They claim Trump University instructors were high-pressure sales people, not “professors and adjunct professors” as Trump touted, and that New York authorities told Trump back in 2005 to stop calling his unaccredited venture a university.

“Somehow, belligerence trumps substance,” plaintiff’s attorney Jason Forge said. “If we say it loud enough, forcefully enough, it becomes true. Well, it doesn’t.”

Trump owned 92 percent of Trump University and had control over all major decisions, plaintiffs’ court papers say.

 

(Additional reporting by Karen Freifeld and Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Tom Brown and Jonathan Oatis)

Photo: Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump formally accepts the nomination at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S. July 21, 2016.     REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni

This Isn’t New: Donald Trump Has Been Profiting Off His Campaign For Months

This Isn’t New: Donald Trump Has Been Profiting Off His Campaign For Months

Donald Trump’s spectacularly bad fundraising report for the month of May, published over the weekend, got a lot of attention. The press picked apart the document, reporting on the lavish amounts of money Trump has paid his own companies, his family’s companies, and his political allies.

“Trump’s campaign spends $6 million with Trump companies,” the Associated Press reported.

But if the media wanted to find evidence of possible wrongdoing, or at least of an extremely bizarre campaign finance regimen, they needn’t have waited until now: Trump, his family, and his associates have been profiting off of this campaign for months.

In February, the New York Timesreported that, of the 12.4 million the Trump campaign had spent in 2015,

About $2.7 million more was paid to at least seven companies Mr. Trump owns or to people who work for his real estate and branding empire, repaying them for services provided to his campaign. That total included more than $2 million for flights on his own planes and helicopter, a quarter of a million dollars to his Fifth Avenue office tower, and even $66,000 to Keith Schiller, his bodyguard and the head of security at the Trump Organization.

We reported back in March that, in January, Trump had spent around six percent of total campaign expenditures on Trump businesses, and the salaries of Trump employees.

In May, Forbesreported that, through the end of March, Trump had paid Trump-owned businesses $4.3 million, or 10 percent of total campaign expenditures through that date.

And now, through May, we know that of the $63 million the Trump campaign has spent this election cycle, 10 percent has been spent on Trump-owned organizations, in keeping with the trend this whole time.

Trump’s campaign expenses happen to be with businesses he owns or is affiliated with. A look at the list of top Trump campaign vendors is telling: Aside from Rick Reed media, a GOP advertising group, most are in some way Trump-related.

Tag Air is the Trump-owned company that operates his private jet. $4.3 million.

Ace Specialties, who manufacture the “Make America Great Again” hats, is owned by Christl Mahfouz, who the Wall Street Journal reported in October serves on the board of the Eric J. Trump foundation. $4 million.

WizBang solutions is run by the Mike Ciletti, the former head of the Make America Great Again PAC, which the Trump campaign disavowed after pressure from the media. They do “printing and design services,” according to the Washington Post. Mike Ciletti is a close business associate of Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s recently-fired campaign manager. $2 million.

And on and on and on: You get the point. When Trump isn’t funneling donor dollars and his own loans to Trump organizations or employees, he’s spending them on the companies of close associates and friends.

And he can pay those “loans” back to himself using donor dollars, as long as he does it before the Republican National Convention in July. Can Donald Trump afford to lose the $45 million he has loaned his campaign so far? We can’t know for sure, especially without seeing his tax returns… Trump did wonder aloud, in May: “Do I want to sell a couple of buildings and self-fund? I don’t know that I want to do that necessarily.”

So, we’ll see. Keep your eyes on the FEC filings.

But now that Trump has dropped all pretense of “self-funding” his general election campaign, this whole branding scheme may get a bit more complicated. Trump loaned his campaign $11.5 million in March, his largest one-month loan. After that, his monthly contributions started decreasing: $7.5 million in April, and just $2.2 million in May.

May was the first month the Trump campaign took in more from donations ($3.1 million) than it did from Trump’s loans.

That’s meaningful. As Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, an election law expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, noted in a New York Times article published yesterday, “as soon as you start using campaign money that has come in from donors, not just the money that he has loaned to himself, and he uses it for something that he will personally keep, or his family will personally keep, that is what crosses the line.”

 

Photo: Republican U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona, June 18, 2016. REUTERS/Nancy Wiechec

Trump Escalates Attacks On Judge In Trump University Suit: WSJ

Trump Escalates Attacks On Judge In Trump University Suit: WSJ

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Thursday escalated his attacks on the federal judge presiding over lawsuits against Trump University, saying the judge had “an absolute conflict” because of his Mexican heritage, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for the Nov. 8 presidential election, is fighting lawsuits that accuse his school venture of misleading thousands of people who paid up to $35,000 for seminars to learn about the billionaire’s real estate investment strategies.

In an interview with the newspaper, Trump said U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel had “an absolute conflict” in presiding over the litigation given that he was “of Mexican heritage” and a member of a Latino lawyers’ association.

Trump said the background of the judge, who was born in Indiana to Mexican immigrants, was relevant because of his campaign stance against illegal immigration and his pledge to seal the southern U.S. border, the Journal said.

“I’m building a wall. It’s an inherent conflict of interest,” Trump said, according to the newspaper.

The New York businessman also alleged the judge was a former colleague and friend of one of the Trump University plaintiffs’ lawyers, the newspaper said.

The judge and the lawyer once worked together as federal prosecutors, but the lawyer, Jason Forge, in an interview with the Journal, said he had never seen the judge socially.

“Neither Judge Curiel’s ethnicity nor the fact that we crossed paths as prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office well over a decade ago is to blame” for Trump’s actions, Forge told the Journal.

An assistant in Curiel’s chambers said he was not commenting on the matter, the newspaper said.

At a rally in San Diego last week, Trump lashed out at Curiel.

“I have a judge who is a hater of Donald Trump. A hater. He’s a hater,” Trump said. “We’re in front of a very hostile judge. The judge was appointed by Barack Obama,” Trump said, adding he believed Curiel was Mexican.

Legal scholars said Trump could face consequences for slamming the judge, although many have speculated that Curiel was unlikely to sanction him formally.

Trump has drawn criticism for his comments about immigrants from Mexico, some of whom he has said were criminals and rapists.

He has proposed building a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico to prevent illegal immigration and requiring Mexico to pay for it.

 

Writing by Eric Beech in Washington; Editing by Peter Cooney

Photo: U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump pumps his fist as he arrives to speak at a campaign rally in Sacramento, California, U.S. June 1, 2016. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

#EndorseThis: Trump Used Professional ‘Testimonial Giver’ In Recent Defense Of Trump U.

#EndorseThis: Trump Used Professional ‘Testimonial Giver’ In Recent Defense Of Trump U.

Will Trump U. be the scandal to finally put some kind of dent in Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency? Only if voters are telling the truth when they say they like Trump because “he tells it like it is” and “he’s successful.”

He’s neither of those things, and Donald’s reaction to media coverage of the multiple lawsuits surrounding Trump U. (he’s not allowed to call it “University”) are telling: Not only does Trump continue to lie about his scheme, he is very unsuccessfully lying about it.

Case in point: Trump says 98 percent of students “approved” of their experience — he put together a sloppy website about it — but that is so clearly a lie it’s difficult to know where to start.

Trump U. was forced to give refunds to 32 percent of students in its $1,495 program and 16 percent of its $34,995 program — and that’s not including students who wanted refunds but didn’t get them. And students who did make it long enough to fill out evaluation forms — the basis of Trump’s 98 percent claims — did so under pressure from instructors, who hovered over them as they filled out forms and called them after the fact to badger them into changing poor reviews.

But Trump’s most recent attempt to clear his image of this scandal is so incompetently dishonest that this whole campaign is starting to look like a long piece of satirical performance art.

The campaign released a video in defense of Trump U. claiming the scam was informative, consensual, honest, and worth the cost. The only problem? As RedState’s Leon Wolf wrote yesterday, the video “features three people – none of whom have ever bought or sold real estate for a living.” Who are the three people in the ad? Michelle Gunn, a professional “testimonial giver,” Kent Moyer, who runs seminar-style events like Trump U. for a living, and Casey Hoban, whose “protein water” product is sold at Trump resorts.

In other words: Trump’s testimonial for a scam is itself, a scam.

Photo: U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Sacramento, California, U.S. June 1, 2016. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson