Trump University: Lawsuit Alleges ‘School For Success’ Was A Scam

Two lawsuits involving GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump and his Trump University are quickly becoming issues in the 2016 presidential race.

Donald Trump has promised to make Americans great before, and as multiple lawsuits allege, it didn’t work out so well. Exactly what he said in the deposition remains under seal, but lawyers for Tarla Makaeff, a California yoga instructor who is the lead plaintiff in the case, cited portions of his testimony (blacked out in her pleadings) to support their contention that Trump has threatened to ruin her financially for bringing the lawsuit and that she needs protection from his “retaliation”.

According to Politico, former attendees of the now-defunct Trump University (think “university” in the loosest terms possible) are suing the real estate mogul for fraud.

According to pretrial documents reviewed by City News Service, Trump is listed as one of 23 potential witnesses for the plaintiffs.

The New York attorney general declined to be interviewed for this report, but provided CNN with six of the 150 affidavits he says he’s collected from unsatisfied Trump University students, who mostly complain their education at the school was worthless.

“More than 5,000 people across the country who paid Donald Trump $40 million to teach them his hard sell tactics got a hard lesson in bait-and-switch”, Schneiderman said in a statement at the time.

The case is expected to start sometime after May 6.

As noted by Yahoo News last week, the Trump University case has already intruded on Trump’s political schedule.

As for investing knowledge, student Maribel Paredes described Trump University in an affidavit as “a bad investment on my part”.

Meanwhile, a class-action suit was filed in California by a former Trump University student named Art Cohen who said he spent more than $36,000 on courses that failed to deliver the top-notch education the university had promised. This is in stark contrast to one of the claimants in the lawsuit saying that after her $35,000 payment she was unable to reach any of the instructors for further tutelage.

An attorney for Trump, Alan Garten, said the reasons for the closing are several. “They got to take a picture with a cardboard cutout of Donald”. Recapping our coverage from several months ago, the Washington Post reported in September that the New York Republican was the namesake of a “university”, where students sometimes “max[ed] out their credit cards to pay tens of thousands of dollars for insider knowledge they believed could make them wealthy”.

It’s not exactly a convenient time for Trump to step off the campaign trail. No trial date has been set, but the judge has indicated his interest in moving the case forward, the pleadings show. A judge in that case ordered both sides to complete “fact discovery” by August 10, according to a Courthouse News story.

“Obviously, everyone knows this is a unique set of circumstances that we have here”.

At one point, Trump tweeted: “Lightweight NYS Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is trying to extort me with a civil law suit”. “I could settle it right now for very little money, but I don’t want to do it out of principle”.

Garten says Trump will continue to fight all three lawsuits until he eventually wins, even if legal fees wipe out any profit he may have made.