US District Judge Gonzalo Curiel took a strong stance Thursday and recommended the parties settle the case to avoid the immense complications of a President-elect facing trial while preparing to take office.“It would be wise for the plaintiffs, for defendants to look closely at trying to resolve this case given all else that is involved,” Curiel said.But Trump has previously refused to settle the cases and has defended the quality of the real estate program, which enrolled about 10,000 students from 2005 until it closed in 2010.“This is a case I could have settled very easily, but I don’t settle cases very easily when I’m right,” Trump said in March.However, Trump’s top lawyer on the case, Daniel Petrocelli, alluded to a possible settlement Thursday, noting the unique responsibilities his client now carries.
Trump Lawyers Agree to Settlement Talks in University Suit
Donald J. Trump’s lawyers agreed on Thursday to enter settlement talks in a class-action fraud lawsuit involving the president-elect and Trump University, now defunct, raising the possibility of a quick end to the six-year-old case just before it goes to trial.
.. Judge Curiel said more than 100 potential jurors would be in court on Nov. 28, and nine would be picked to begin hearing arguments no more than two days later. He said he expected both sides to finish presenting their cases around Dec. 14.
.. The claims largely mirror another class-action complaint in San Diego and a lawsuit in New York.
President-elect Trump due to appear in court at trial starting later this month
A good indication of whether the trial will go forward as planned is likely to come Thursday afternoon, when Curiel is scheduled to hear arguments on what kinds of evidence and questions will be off limits during the trial.
At the hearing, Curiel is also scheduled to consider whether Trump’s campaign trail statements will be fair game at the trial and whether all references to allegations about his “personal conduct” should be off limits, as his lawyers’ have urged.
.. Trump is not required to be present throughout the trial, although as it stands now he would have to be in the courtroom to testify for his side and the plaintiffs.
.. There are actually two pending federal suits: the one set for trial this month involves Trump University students from California, Florida and New York, addressing claims that the program violated those states’ tough laws against defrauding consumers and the elderly.
The other case is national in scope and invokes a federal racketeering statute.
.. Trump’s lawyers say claims that students would be told Trump’s “secrets” or that he was personally involved in selecting teachers were, at worst, marketing “puffery” not intended to be taken literally.
.. he could simply drop some of the cases he’s filed, like the suits against the restaurateurs. He could forgo his plans to sue his female accusers. And to make the Trump University cases he could do something he has long vowed not to do: swallow his pride and pay up.
Trump’s history of corruption is mind-boggling. So why is Clinton supposedly the corrupt one?
In the heat of a presidential campaign, you’d think that a story about one party’s nominee giving a large contribution to a state attorney general who promptly shut down an inquiry into that nominee’s scam “university” would be enormous news. But we continue to hear almost nothing about what happened between Donald Trump and Florida attorney general Pam Bondi.
.. Trump paid a penalty to the IRS after his foundation made an illegal contribution to Bondi’s PAC.
.. And the comparison with stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails or the Clinton Foundation is extremely instructive. Whenever we get some new development in any of those Clinton stories, you see blanket coverage — every cable network, every network news program, every newspaper investigates it at length. And even when the new information serves to exonerate Clinton rather than implicate her in wrongdoing, the coverage still emphasizes that the whole thing just “raises questions” about her integrity.
.. The story of something like the Clinton Foundation gets stretched out over months and months with repeated tellings, always with the insistence that questions are being raised and the implication that shady things are going on, even if there isn’t any evidence at a particular moment to support that idea... The end result of this process is that because of all that repeated examination of Clinton’s affairs, people become convinced that she must be corrupt to the core. It’s not that there isn’t plenty of negative coverage of Trump, because of course there is, but it’s focused mostly on the crazy things he says on any given day... But the truth is that you’d have to work incredibly hard to find a politician who has the kind of history of corruption, double-dealing, and fraud that Donald Trump has. The number of stories which could potentially deserve hundreds and hundreds of articles is absolutely staggering
- According to the allegations, Ailes’s behavior was positively monstrous; as just one indicator, his abusive and predatory actions toward women were so well-known and so loathsome that in 1968 the morally upstanding folks in the Nixon administration refused to allow him to work there despite his key role in getting Nixon elected.
.. the frames around the candidates are locked in: Trump is supposedly the crazy/bigoted one, and Clinton is supposedly the corrupt one. Once we decide that those are the appropriate lenses through which the two candidates are to be viewed, it shapes the decisions the media make every day about which stories are important to pursue.