DONALD TRUMP UNIVERSITY IS A TOTAL FRAUD

…The UNIVERSITY is mostly just a single floor in Trump Towers

 

Class Action Suits and a $40 million law suit, that’s the real Trump University

 

Donald Trump has billed his ‘Trump University’ as being a “road to riches”, but critics call it a total fraud.

 

Two class action lawsuits have accused Trump University of using deceptive practices.  Trump University brought in millions of dollars from customers who were told they would learn Trump’s techniques to become successful in the world of real estate. Trump and his attorneys have vigorously denied the fraud claims, but their only proof of it not being a fraud has been their pointing to some high ratings that some university students gave the courses.  No substantial proof of content of the university’s criteria has been provided by Trump’s lawyers.

 

The court recently released the damning published sales techniques used by the Trump University sales personnel and they are highly deceptive and their honesty is questionable.

 

In addition to the class action cases, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has filed a $40 million lawsuit in 2013 alleging that Trump had defrauded more than 5,000 individuals through Trump University, which was never officially licensed as an official educational institution.

 

One of the big hoaxes of the university was that instead of Trump showing up personally to meet his university students, a life-size cardboard picture of Trump was provided for the students to have their picture taken with at the end of the course.

 

In the latest episode on the university, Trump has been bad-mouthing the judge in charge of the court case against the university while Trump has been on the campaign trail.   Trump is saying that Curiel’s Hispanic heritage made him biased due to Trump’s support for building a wall on the Mexican border.  Last week while campaigning, Trump said that Curiel “happens to be, we believe, Mexican.” (Uh-oh, Trump’s claiming another “Birther” issue.)  Trump then called the judge a “hater of Donald Trump” who had “railroaded” him in the case.  “I think Judge Curiel should be ashamed of himself. I think it’s a disgrace that he is doing this, “ Trump said.

 

To put things back into perspective, yes, Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s heritage is Hispanic.  But he was born in 1953, in Indiana.  He’s an American, not Mexican.

In his order, Curiel has noted that Trump had emerged as a leading presidential candidate over the course of the civil case against Trump University and that Trump had “placed the integrity of these court proceedings at issue.” The judge pointed to a previous case saying that courts deciding on public disclosure must weigh “whether a party benefitting from the order of confidentiality is a public entity or official; and . . . whether the case involves issues important to the public.” 

 

All the judge is saying is that the public has the right to see if the man that is running for the US presidency owns a company that is possibly defrauding his own university students.

 

Trump University was started in 2004 for offering courses in real estate entre­pre­neur­ship under the Trump brand. Trump had given his blessing to the school, as was reported previously by The Post, and Trump had 93% percent ownership of the enterprise.

 

It was The Post that had originally intervened, arguing that Trump’s pursuit of the presidency made his business dealings a matter of public interest and that the Trump University, which is today an inactive company, had no compelling reason to maintain its secrecy.

 

Some of the university’s internal documents were previously made public. A 2010 “playbook” published by Politico, for instance, directed the university’s sales people to rank the students based on their liquid assets.  This was solely to determine who to target for buying the school’s more advanced and more expensive courses.

 

Trump and his attorneys have said the company would "possibly return in some form", after the case is resolved, and that it would be damaged by the release of their marketing material.  In other words, by telling the public the truth about their sales tactics, it might cause them to loose sales….DUH!

 

Judge Curiel seemed unconvinced about the lawyer’s concerns. Trump’s “assertion that the information retains any commercial value is speculative given the lack of any support for their statement that Trump University ‘may’ resume operations,” the order release said.

 

Curiel also ordered that the playbooks and other records, numbering about 1,000 pages, be released, allowing them time to redact telephone numbers and other personal information about the company.  That was released this week.

 

Attorney General Schneiderman has alleged in the suit that Trump personally earned $5 million from the enterprise, in which sales personnel were assigned to get people to pay $1,495 for a three-day seminar in real estate techniques. In selling the courses, Trump released a marketing video that said, “We are going to have professors and adjunct professors that are absolutely terrific . . . and these are all people who are going to be handpicked by me.”

 

However, one of the university’s top executives, Michael Sexton, subsequently testified in one of the class action suits that “none of the professors at the live events were handpicked by Trump”. Depositions released in March quote Trump acknowledging his lack of a close involvement with the school’s mentors and students.

 

During the GOP primaries, fraud allegations were highlighted during this year’s campaign for the GOP presidential nomination by some of Trump’s competitors and by a super PAC that opposed Trump.

 

And after all this, Trump has the gall to call his competition, “Crooked Hillary”.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2016