The tirades against the respected federal judge may have less to do with his ethnicity than with the magnitude of the legal challenges facing Trump.
..Curiel is presiding over two separate class-action lawsuits about Trump University. One of them, Low v. Trump University, was filed in April 2010 under the name Markaeff v. Trump University. The other, Cohen v. Trump, was filed in October 2013. (A third case brought by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in 2013 is also under way in that state.) Trump is named as a defendant in both cases.
.. The Low plaintiffs sued Trump University and Trump himself under various consumer-protection laws in California, Florida, and New York—a relatively standard class-action lawsuit.
.. Cohen, on the other hand, targets Trump through a provision of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, more commonly known as the RICO Act—the same statute federal prosecutors use to bring down mob bosses.
.. The judge’s role when addressing a summary-judgment motion is to determine whether there are any factual disputes.
In Low, the plaintiffs’ case centers on three misrepresentations allegedly made to them by Trump and Trump University: “(1) Trump University was an accredited university; (2) students would be taught by real estate experts, professors and mentors hand-selected by Mr. Trump; and (3) students would receive one year of expert support and mentoring.”
.. This doesn’t mean Curiel sided with the plaintiffs on the facts of the case. It means that Curiel determined a factual dispute existed between Trump and the plaintiffs—nothing more, nothing less.
.. The public is presumed to have the right to access court documents barring “compelling reasons” to keep them sealed, but Trump argued against their release by citing the existence of trade secrets within the internal “playbooks.”
.. Trump has publicly complained about Curiel since at least 2014, when one of his lawyers claimed Trump would ask Curiel to recuse himself based on his alleged (and unspecified) “animosity toward Mr. Trump and his views” after Curiel rejected his motion for dismissal. Almost two years later, no motion for recusal can be found on the docket of either case, then or now.
That Judge Attacked by Donald Trump? He’s Faced a Lot Worse
Experts in legal ethics say that seeking to discredit a judge is not a winning strategy and that the suggestion that Judge Curiel could not treat a case fairly because of his ethnicity raises questions about Mr. Trump’s ability to appoint judges.
Deborah L. Rhode, a professor at Stanford Law School and the founding director of the university’s Center on Ethics, said that calls for Judge Curiel to step down from a case because of his Mexican roots were akin to saying that Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice, should never have been able to decide civil rights cases.
“If race were a disqualifying factor, nobody could preside over these cases,” Ms. Rhode said.
.. But, remembering when his friend, then a prosecutor, arrived at his house for a barbecue flanked by bodyguards, Mr. Vega noted the irony of Mr. Trump’s criticizing someone who had risked his life to slow the flow of drugs coming from Mexico into the United States — an issue that is dear to Mr. Trump.
“A lot of us have never been tested like that,” Mr. Vega said.