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.
NY Attorney General’s Suit Regarding Trump University
51. Former president Michael Sexton admitted in his sworn subpoenaed testimony that “[t]here wasn’t anything sophisticated about” the three-day seminar and that instead it was “really an opportunity for an individual to make the decision[:] is real estate investing something that I am actually going to pursu[?]” rather than actually teaching them what they needed to know to get started.
.. 59. As students later discovered, these claims were untrue. Rather than being photographed with Donald Trump, they were offered the chance to have photos taken with a life-size photo of Donald Trump.
.. 104. As noted above, Trump University speakers at three-day seminars urged students to call their credit card companies during a break in the sessions, requesting increases to their credit limits.
105. Speakers often claimed that the reason for this request was to obtain additional capital for real estate transactions and property improvements for “flipping” houses and apartments, but in reality the purpose was so that students could use the additional credit to purchase expensive Trump Elite programs.
106. Trump University even provided handouts with scripted talking points for students to use in their phone calls with credit card companies, explicitly encouraging people to falsify their current income, “add[ing] projected income from corporate entities that had not been created, with the script telling students: “If they ask you to prove income, inform them that it will be too much trouble to put all the paperwork together.”
.. 119. Trump University was also aware that some of its instructors and mentors who had been investing in real estate had filed for Chapter 7 bankrupcy protection shortly before coming to work at Trump University, belying any claims of success as real estate investors.
.. 146. Sexton was President of Trump University from its inception in 2004 until late in 2010. He was one of the four members of Trump University LLC, with a 4.5 equity interest. He was also involved in the creation of Trump University, including bringing the idea to Trump in 2004 and meeting with him and Trump Organization employees to discuss its formation and the terms of the Trump University LLC agreement.
.. 149. Trump Organization also directed and controlled the acts and practices of Trump University and had knowledge of its fraudulent and illegal conduct.
150. Indeed Trump University LLC corporate form was regularly ignored. There were never any meetings of the members, no votes ever taken, and no minutes of meetings ever prepared.
151. Major corporate decisions were routinely made for Trump University LLC by individuals at Trump Organization who were not officers, directors, or employees of the company or its members, such as the decision to change Trump University’s business model in 2005, or to wind down its operations in 2010 due to poor revenue performance.
Trump University Is a Devastating Metaphor for the Trump Campaign
And if Democrats use it effectively, it will be his undoing.
.. “The emerging approach to defining Trump is an updated iteration of the ‘Bain Strategy’—the Obama 2012 campaign’s devastating attacks on Mitt Romney’s dealings with investment firm Bain Capital,” Democratic operative and campaign aides told Politico. “This time, Democrats would highlight the impact of Trump’s four business bankruptcies—and his opposition to wage hikes at his casinos and residential properties—on the families of his workers.”
.. The Trump University scam undermines the very notion that a man of Trump’s greed can ever be trusted to advance the interests of others.
.. Early in that campaign, they ran up against a problem they hadn’t planned for. When they pressed voters in focus groups for their views on Romney’s economic platform, it didn’t rate as negatively as they expected, because voters literally couldn’t believe the premise of the questions: Why would anyone who wanted to be president propose privatizing Medicare and giving rich people enormous tax cuts? For a scary number of voters, it just didn’t compute.
.. “[O]nce people have learned that Romney was willing to fire workers and terminate health and pension benefits while taking tens of millions out of companies,” a prominent Democratic pollster told The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent four years ago, “they are much more ready to understand that Romney would indeed cut Social Security and Medicare to give tax breaks to rich people like himself.”
.. Trump U is devastating because it’s metaphor for his whole campaign: promising hardworking Americans way to get ahead, but all based on lies