How does Trump have time to campaign when he is involed in literally dozens of lawsuits for fraud? Starting with Trump U?

Many people believe that higher education is a de facto scam. Trump University, Donald Trump’s real-estate institution, was a de jure one. First thing first, Trump University was never a university. When the “school” was established in 2005, the New York State Education Department warned that it was in violation of state law for operating without a NYSED license. Trump ignored the warnings. (The institution is now called, ahem, “Trump Entrepreneur Initiative.”) Cue lawsuits. Trump University is currently the defendant in three lawsuits — two class-action lawsuits filed in California, and one filed in New York by then-attorney general Eric Schneiderman, who told CNN’s New Day in 2013: “We started looking at Trump University and discovered that it was a classic bait-and-switch scheme. It was a scam, starting with the fact that it was not a university.” Trump U “students” say the same. In his affidavit, Richard Hewson reported that he and his wife “concluded that we had paid over $20,000 for nothing, based on our belief in Donald Trump and the promises made at the [organization’s] free seminar and three-day workshop.” But “the whole thing was a scam.” In fact, $20,000 is only a mid-range loss. The lead plaintiff in one of the California suits, yoga instructor Tarla Makaeff, says she was “scammed” out of $60,000 over the course of her time in Trump U. How could that have happened? The New York suit offers a suggestion: The free seminars were the first step in a bait and switch to induce prospective students to enroll in increasingly expensive seminars starting with the three-day $1495 seminar and ultimately one of respondents’ advanced seminars such as the “Gold Elite” program costing $35,000. At the “free” 90-minute introductory seminars to which Trump University advertisements and solicitations invited prospective students, Trump University instructors engaged in a methodical, systematic series of misrepresentations designed to convince students to sign up for the Trump University three-day seminar at a cost of $1495. The Atlantic, which got hold of a 41-page “Private & Confidential” playbook from Trump U, has attested to the same: The playbook says almost nothing about the guest speaker presentations, the ostensible reason why people showed up to the seminar in the first place. Instead, the playbook focuses on the seminars’ real purpose: to browbeat attendees into purchasing expensive Trump University course packages. To do that, instructors touted Trump’s own promises: that students would be “mentored” by “handpicked” real-estate experts, who would use Trump’s own real-estate strategies. Here’s Trump making the pitch himself: But according to the New York complaint, none of the instructors was “handpicked” by Trump, many of them came from fields having nothing to do with real estate, and Trump “‘never’ reviewed any of Trump University’s curricula or programming materials.” The materials were “in large part developed by a third-party company that creates and develops materials for an array of motivational speakers and seminar and timeshare rental companies.” Furthermore, Trump’s promises that the three-day seminar ($1,495) would include “access to ‘private’ or ‘hard money’ lenders and financing,” that it would include a “year-long ‘apprenticeship support’ program,” and that it would “​improve the credit scores”​ of students were empty. Those empty promises are the subject of a new series of anti-Trump ads by superPAC American Future Fund: According to Bob, “I never heard from anybody about giving me a list of hard-money lenders”: Kevin, another Trump U “student,” says Trump University “ruined” his credit score: And according to Sherri, a single mother who participated in Trump U: “It was all supposedly supervised by Donald Trump, run by Donald Trump. All of it was just a fake.”

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/432010/