About that “university”…
A legal scholar says Trump could be impeached before taking office (if elected).
Professor Christopher L. Peterson has found that should Trump win the election in November, he would be vulnerable to impeachment even before he takes office, thanks to fraud and racketeering lawsuits related to the Trump University case.
“In the United States, it is illegal for businesses to use false statements to convince consumers to purchase their services,” Peterson wrote in a paper published Monday titled Trump University and Presidential Impeachment. “The evidence indicates that Trump University used a systemic pattern of fraudulent representations to trick thousands of [people] into investing in a program that can be argued was a sham.”
Fraud and racketeering are serious crimes, oddly enough – especially at the level of Trump’s frauds.
Trump University, say a number of litigants, was billed as a series of seminars with Donald Trump and top real estate professionals that would teach enrollees to wheel and deal in high-value properties and amass millions in profit.
[People] were encouraged to take out extravagant loans and max out their credit cards to pay the program’s $30,000 average tuition. Documents have been introduced into evidencethat show that the organization targeted the families of veterans and single mothers as ideal prospects for the scam.
Peterson said that evidence in the case thus far shows that in no way was Trump University an actual educational seminar, but in fact a “sales environment” where enrollees were urged to put more and more of their own money into the program.
Like those “seminars” that talk people into buying time shares in Florida condos. Those aren’t universities.
“Sales practices at each seminar were systematically designed, painstakingly choreographed, and implemented ruthlessly,” he wrote, based on internal memos between Trump University administrators and staff. “Posing as teachers, sales staff were trained to manipulate students’ emotions in order to sell expensive ‘Trump elite’ packages.”
“Trump University trained staff to find the emotional vulnerabilities of students and exploit those vulnerabilities to sell additional Trump University packages,” he said.
Just as sellers are trained at those Florida condos “seminars”!
Many attendees were left bankrupt with their credit ruined. Then when they attempted to seek redress, their calls weren’t returned and the company appeared to evaporate into thin air.
I guess they were losers. Trump doesn’t answer the phone when losers call.
From Peterson’s university’s press release:
In an analysis titled “Trump University and Presidential Impeachment,” Peterson explores Trump’s actions as the leader of Trump University, a for-profit business founded in 2005 where students spent upwards of $30,000 to learn real estate development skills. Trump University advertised curriculum and instructors chosen by Trump, promising students a high-caliber and selective experience. In fact, according to Peterson, Trump University was an unaccredited and unlicensed series of get-rich-quick seminars provided by traveling salesmen. The school closed in 2010 and lawsuits—including one filed by the state of New York alleging Trump tricked students out of $40 million—are ongoing. (Two class action cases in California are also pending).
It’s as if Bernie Madoff were running for president, after the Ponzi scheme fell apart. It’s not exactly like that, because the sums involved were in the billions, not millions, but morally speaking…it’s like that. It’s sleazy as fuck. Why are we teetering on the edge of electing not only a fascist but a sleazy swindling grifter?
Let’s see, who should be president…how about someone as misogynist as Milo Yiannopoulos, as racist as David Duke, as xenophobic as Nigel Farage, as ignorant as Sarah Palin – and a crook to boot! What’s not to love, am I right?
Peterson’s analysis is among the first from a legal scholar offering an objective and professional analysis of these issues. Unlike other political issues currently subject to debate, the legal claims of fraud and racketeering in the Trump University cases have survived early judicial scrutiny and are likely to proceed to trial. Peterson’s research focuses on the Trump University cases—and not on the background of other presidential candidates—because the legal issues facing Trump align with his academic expertise.
A recognized authority on consumer protection cases, Peterson has frequently testified in Congressional hearings and has presented his research to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Reserve Board of Governors and at the White House in both Democratic and Republican administrations.
All sleaze all the time.
I wish the article had just stuck with the fraud allegations as evidence of why Trump shouldn’t be elected. The discussion of impeachment is troubling to me.
Impeachment is as much a political act as it is a legal one — arguably more so. I don’t think it is legitimate for Congress to impeach a newly-elected President for offenses that the electorate knew about and chose to ignore. Impeachment shouldn’t be used to override the will of the electorate. At least when the Republicans impeached Bill Clinton, they could argue that his perjury in the Paula Jones deposition wasn’t known during his 1996 re-election. But here we’re talking about facts about Trump that are available to the voting public.
If Hillary wins the election, you can be sure that some idiot Republican Congressman will talk about impeaching her, over her emails or Benghazi or whatever. In fact, I’ve already read one piece of conservative punditry arguing that they should impeach her now and render her ineligible for the presidency.
In one sense it’s a moot point, as there’s no way 2/3 of the Senate would vote to convict either President Clinton or Trump based on currently available information. (And, in the case of Trump, the Republican House would never impeach in the first place.)
But I think it’s pretty damaging to the political discourse to have impeachment treated like an appropriate response to the voters making a mistake. Even a yuuuuuuge mistake.
And impeachment raises another nasty thought – a Mike Pence presidency. Pence is as toxic as Trump in many ways, even if he isn’t so obviously sleazy.
Yes, I’m not really taking a position on impeachment. I suppose I think multiple crimes should be an official barrier to nomination.
But one could hope that awareness of his actual crimes would deter some people from voting for him who otherwise would.
iknklast @2: Yeah, Pence is no prize. Though at least I’m not aware of any glaring character defect, other than the ones you can infer from his policies. (Enabling discrimination against LGBTQs, wanting to control women’s bodies, and depriving the working class of health insurance doesn’t speak well of one’s character.) But at least he’s a standard-issue Republican. If I put myself in the mindset of a true blue (true red?) conservative, I could understand voting for a Mike Pence. I have difficulty understanding voting for a Donald Trump — and I say that as someone who thinks that “character” is a little overrated as a presidential criterion, in that I would take a mildly crooked/tempermentally flawed candidate with good policies over a purehearted upstanding one with lousy policies. Trump goes well beyond “mildly” crooked or tempermentally flawed.
Ophelia @3: And yet, a recent poll showed that voters rate Trump higher than Clinton on honesty. I’m just flabbergasted by that. Trump’s lies are so frequent, obvious, brazen, and shameless that I can only interpret this as another sign that most voters aren’t paying much attention.
A 25-year drumbeat about how much she lies, cheats, and steals has taken its toll. Crooked Hillary has become the national zeitgeist, and it’s hard to get past. The press has drummed on and on and on about her “lies” (some of which are probably mistakes, because not everything a candidate says that is false is a lie). Trump has drummed on and on and on about her lies.
And there are probably a lot of people who grab at that desperately, grateful to have some other reason not to vote for her other than that she is a woman. They feel discomfort with that, but don’t want to admit it because they are liberal thinkers. But she doesn’t meet their image of what a woman should be, and so they cling to the story of how much of a liar she is – which is no more of a liar than most others, and really pretty close to the the same in her percentage of false statements (lies? Probably some of them) as Sanders.
Time for a new edition of Joe Conason’s The Hunting of the President.
https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Hunting_of_the_President.html?id=tIEqNExC7_4C&hl=en