On Saturday, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sued Donald Trump over his involvement with Trump University -- basically, expensive seminars that promised students they'd learn about real estate and investing. The AG alleges the program was a fraudulent get-rich-quick scheme, and is seeking $40 million in restitution.
Trump, naturally, responded by called the A.G. "a sleazebag," a "lightweight," and "dopey" and retweeting messages from his sycophants.
Allegedly, a free 90-minute seminar would bait people to sign up for a 3-day, $1,495 Trump University seminar, at which people would be encouraged to buy $35,000 memberships. But students complained they didn't learn much and that, after spending all their dough on the seminars, they were deep in debt and had nothing left to invest in properties, or couldn't get mortgages.
Also: they didn't even get to meet The Donald at the seminars; they only got to take pictures with a cardboard cutout of him.
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Trump being Trump, he was not going to sit quietly by, of course. Last week, he launched a website called 98percentapproval.com, that features testimonials like "'Great presentation!' -WC" and "'Excellent information. Thank you all!' - VP", but is mainly there to counter-attack Schneiderman.
From the website:
While Schneiderman's investigation into Trump University first arose out of a larger inquiry into for-profit schools that accepted federal funding, his office quickly learned that neither Trump University nor its students had ever received any form of federal funding, subsidies or other government aid and offered all of its students a 3 day money back guarantee if they were not completely satisfied. Despite learning these facts, for the last two years, Schneiderman's office has spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars conducting a no holds barred, scorched earth investigation, assigning as many as ten of his staff members to interview former Trump University employees and review literally hundreds of thousands of pages of documents. Making matters worse, Schneiderman chose to devote such valuable taxpayer dollars to looking into Trump University even though there was already a class action lawsuit pending in California brought by the firm of disgraced former lawyers and convicted felons Bill Lerach and Mel Weiss.
Through Twitter, Trump said the lawsuit was extortion, and suggested it was some kind of political subterfuge that President Obama was involved with.
Wow, l just found out that A.G. Schneiderman met with President Obama in Syracuse on Thursday --- and sued me on Saturday! Same as IRS etc.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 25, 2013
He also hinted he might have some dirt on Schneiderman, to whom he donated $12,500 in a 2010 campaign.
What did our very stupid & ineffective A.G. Eric Schneidean, during his trips to MY office, tell me about President Obama & Governor Cuomo?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 25, 2013
Sites like RipoffReport and PissedConsumer have complaints about Trump University dating back as far as 2007, and by 2011 or earlier, students had already been complaining to attorneys general in Florida, New York, Texas, and Illinois.
In recent years, Trump University morphed into something called "the Trump Entrepreneur Initiative, after New York's Department of Education argued that the term "university" was misleading.
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