Reported by The Daily Dot, the Trump Campaign is now requiring some volunteers to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements before they can help the campaign – agreements that would theoretically allow Trump to sue volunteers for talking about the campaign and a process that some legal experts say is unusual and probably unenforceable.
2. No Disparagement. During the term of your service and at all times thereafter you hereby promise and agree not to demean or disparage publicly the Company, Mr. Trump, any Trump Company, any Family Member, or any Family Member Company or any asset any of the foregoing own, or product or service any of the foregoing offer, in each case by or in any of the Restricted Means and Contexts and to prevent your employees from doing so.
3. No Competitive Services. Until the Non-Compete Cutoff Date you promise and agree not to assist or counsel, directly or indirectly, for compensation or as a volunteer, any person that is a candidate or exploring candidacy for President of the United States other than Mr. Trump and to prevent your employees from doing so.
Volunteers also sign a non-disclosure agreement, forbidding them from sharing any sensitive information from the campaign. What kind of information is sensitive or confidential is completely at Trump’s discretion, according to the contract.
Volunteers must also sign a non-compete agreement that extends until Trump ceases his campaign for president, identified in the contract as the “Non-Compete Cutoff Date.” The agreement also forbids volunteers from working for another presidential candidate, should they change their minds.
In the event of a Trump victory in November’s general election, the non-compete clause could extend until his 2020 reelection campaign or even 2024, at the end of a second Trump term, the document explains. If Trump loses but wants to run again in the next election or in any presidential election in the future, the contract states the volunteer cannot work for another candidate.
Volunteers are, once again, theoretically bound to “to prevent your employees from” working on any other presidential campaign at any point while Trump is running for president, ostensibly locking them into Trump’s political career for life.
Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi endorsed Donald Trump. This isn’t news because Bondi became the first big-name Republican official in the state to endorse Donald Trump for president, but instead of reported bribes from 3 years ago.
In the fall of 2013, Bondi was preparing for a re-election bid and a for-profit college called Trump University had just been sued by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. The lawsuit alleged that Trump University had “scammed” more than 5,000 people out of more than $40 million by falsely promising to teach them the tools to Trump’s real estate success.
With media scrutiny mounting, the Donald J. Trump Foundation that September contributed $25,000 to Bondi’s campaign.
Bondi never followed New York’s lead in taking action against Trump and Trump University. Although there were complaints in Florida, the state never opened an investigation.
Reality
On Sept. 14, 2013, the Sentinel quoted a spokeswoman for Bondi who said that Florida’s attorney general was studying the New York lawsuit to see whether she wanted to take action in Florida as well.
Three days later, on Sept. 17, 2013, Trump’s foundation cut a $25,000 check to a committee associated with Bondi’s campaign. It was one of the largest checks that her “And Justice for All” PAC had received.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has never been shy about claiming a flair for moneymaking.
But his tax returns, which he has refused to release, may tell a different story.
Crain’s New York reports that the New York real estate developer and self-described deca-billionaire claimed a a New York state property-tax benefit reserved for individuals and couples earning $500,000 a year or less. The New York State School Tax Relief program, otherwise known as STAR, was first instituted in 1997, and offers a mere $300 annual tax break to those who qualify.
According to Crain’s, records filed with New York City’s Department of Finance indicate that Trump received a $302 STAR benefit on his latest property-tax bill for his penthouse unit at Trump Tower. “That means whatever his annual income is, it’s less than $500,000,” Crain’s reported. “And Trump would have to have declared his New York apartment as his primary residence and sent the state a copy of his federal income-tax return in order to quality for the $302 tax break.”
Trump’s campaign claims the benefit was “an error on the party of the city of New York,” and that the candidate has been receiving the benefit since 2012, even though he hadn’t filed for it since 2009. The Department of Finance denies this, saying it confirms recipients’ income with New York state tax authorities every year to ensure STAR applicants continue to qualify.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio charged Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump with hypocrisy for hiring undocumented immigrants for his real estate projects instead of American citizens.
“He hired from Poland, and he had to pay a million dollars or so in a judgment,” Rubio said. “That’s a fact. People can look it up. I’m sure people are Googling it right now, ‘Trump Polish workers.’ You’ll see $1 million for hiring illegal workers on one of his projects. He did.”
Politifact did some Googling and also reached out to the Rubio campaign, which referred them to mediareports about a protracted class-action lawsuit involving his hiring of Polish aliens 36 years ago.
Sometime between 1979 and 1980, Trump hired a contractor to demolish an old building in midtown Manhattan to make way for Trump Tower. The contractor signed on workers from a local union and, to meet Trump’s tight deadline, also brought on 200 undocumented laborers from Poland dubbed the “Polish Brigade.”
The Polish employees were off-the-books, working 12-hour shifts seven days a week for $4 to $5 an hour, with no overtime. Some workers were never paid what they were owed.
In 1983, union members sued a union boss, Trump and his contractor for cheating the union out of pension and welfare funds by hiring the Polish Brigade. Trump owed the union pension fund $1 million, the plaintiffs said.
Appearing in court in 1990, Trump blamed the violations on the contractor and denied knowing that the Polish workers were undocumented.
Fox News Channel accused Donald Trump of asking the network for a $5 million donation as a “quid pro quo” in return for Trump’s promise to appear in Thursday night’s Republican debate, as an extraordinary feud between the right’s best-known media platform and the Republican party’s presidential front-runner overshadowed the last debate before the Iowa caucuses.
“Roger Ailes had three brief conversations with Donald Trump today about possibly appearing at the debate – there were not multiple calls placed by Ailes to Trump.
In the course of those conversations, we acknowledged his concerns about a satirical observation we made in order to quell the attacks on Megyn Kelly, and prevent her from being smeared any further.
Furthermore, Trump offered to appear at the debate upon the condition that Fox News contribute $5 million to his charities. We explained that was not possible and we could not engage in a quid pro quo, nor could any money change hands for any reason.
We have accomplished those two goals and we are pleased with the outcome. We’re very proud to have her on stage as a debate moderator alongside Bret Baier & Chris Wallace.”
A series of protests interrupted Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s Miami campaign speech.
The pro-immigration demonstrators stopped Trump three times, before being shouted down by Trump supporters and removed from the facility.
“You can get them out, just don’t hurt them,” Trump advised to building security at Trump National Doral Miami, a resort the candidate owns.
He insisted the interruptions didn’t bother him, saying that “that’s what freedom of speech is about.”
“Isn’t this more fun than having like a normal deal?” the billionaire told his supporters. “This is more fun, right?”
But after several interruptions, he became peeved, noting that he had been polite to the first two disruptors.
See the first group, I was nice. Oh, take your time. The second group, I was pretty nice. The third group, I’ll be a little more violent, and the fourth group, I’ll say, ‘Get the hell out of here!’
Reality
Threats are not protected free speech by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.
Comments like these add to the growing evidence that Donald Trump supports and condones violence against people with different ideas.
They hoped to get rich off real estate, and who would be a better mentor than one of the richest men in the world? So they enrolled in Donald Trump’s university to learn the tricks of the trade, some of them maxing out their credit cards to pay tens of thousands of dollars for insider knowledge they believed could make them wealthy.
With Trump rising in the polls as the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, his brief foray into education is an episode — and a business failure — that remains far more obscure than other chapters of the celebrity billionaire’s career.
Never licensed as a school, Trump University was in reality a series of real estate workshops in hotel ballrooms around the country, not unlike many other for-profit self-help or motivational seminars. Though short-lived, it remains a thorn in Trump’s side nearly five years after its operations ceased: In three pending lawsuits, including one in which the New York attorney general is seeking $40 million in restitution, former students allege that the enterprise bilked them out of their money with misleading advertisements.
Instead of a fast route to easy money, these Trump University students say they found generic seminars led by salesmen who pressured them to invest more cash in additional courses. The students say they didn’t learn Trump’s secrets and never received the one-on-one guidance they expected.
It’s a chapter of Trump’s past that shows how he sometimes defies the usual laws of campaign physics. Such allegations of multimillion-dollar fraud might sink other candidates, but in Trump’s case, even some of the students who felt duped said they haven’t given up on him: They like Trump. They admire him. They might even vote for him.
“He says what he means, not like politicians, not like Obama,” said Louie Liu of Hurst, Tex. Liu, a motel owner, said in a sworn affidavit that he paid $1,495 for a three-day seminar, then felt lured into paying $24,995 for more classes, an online training program and a three-day in-person mentorship. A few days later, he called to ask for a refund, but his request was rejected. Trump University, he concluded, was a “scam.”
Trump’s attorneys vigorously deny the charges. Alan Garten, general counsel for the Trump Organization, said the company offered aspiring real estate investors a quality education and that all but a handful of students were pleased with it.
It is unbelievable, Garten said, that anyone could have thought that Trump University was a university in the traditional sense. Classes were held in hotel ballrooms, after all. “People who say, ‘I thought it was a university with a football team and a bookstore,’ it’s laughable,” he said.
Trump University was born in 2004, when two businessmen proposed to offer distance-learning courses in entrepreneurship under the Trump brand. Trump gave his blessing, according to court documents, becoming a 93 percent owner of the new enterprise.
By 2007, the business had evolved to focus on live real estate seminars. But Trump University was not a university in any legal sense, and beginning in 2005, New York State Education Department officials told the company to change its name because they deemed it misleading. The business became the Trump Entrepreneur Initiative in May 2010, and it stopped operating shortly thereafter.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D) filed his $40 million suit against Trump and Trump University in 2013, alleging that Trump had illegally operated an unlicensed university and defrauded students. Approximately 80,000 people attended Trump University’s free introductory seminars, according to court documents. About 9,200 of them went on to pay $1,495 for three-day seminars, and nearly 800 paid up to $35,000 for packages that included mentorships and workshops.
“No one, no matter how rich or popular they are, has a right to scam hard working New Yorkers,” Schneiderman said in a news release at the time.
Trump attacked Schneiderman, calling him a “political hack” whose lawsuit was a publicity grab and a shakedown for campaign contributions. “We have a school that’s a terrific school. It did a fantastic job,” Trump told ABC’s “Good Morning America” in 2013.
Trump’s campaign referred questions to Garten, Trump’s lawyer, who said the allegations are baseless and expressed confidence that Trump will prevail.
“We’re completely winning this case,” Garten said.
Matt Mittenthal, a spokesman for Schneiderman, said the attorney general could not comment on the pending suit. “We will continue to pursue our claims against Mr. Trump in court on behalf of the people he defrauded,” Mittenthal said.
The judge in the New York case ruled last year that Trump is personally liable for illegally operating a university without a proper license. But the judge also ruled that the statute of limitations prevents Schneiderman from seeking restitution for most of Trump University’s students, a decision Schneiderman is appealing. Whether the university defrauded students and how much Trump might owe in damages are yet to be decided.
Trump University introduced itself to potential customers with advertisements on radio and television, and in newspapers. The ads promoted a free, two-hour real estate seminar and a chance to learn Trump’s strategies from his “handpicked instructors.”
“He’s earned more in a day than most people do in a lifetime,” reads a 2009 ad featuring Trump’s photograph. “He’s living a life many men and women only dream about. And now he’s ready to share — with Americans like you — the Trump process for investing in today’s once-in-a-lifetime real estate market.”
The ad goes on to quote Trump: “I can turn anyone into a successful real estate investor, including you.”
The soundtrack for the free seminars was “For the Love of Money,” the theme song for “The Apprentice,” Trump’s reality television show. Instructors allegedly told inspirational stories of their own business successes and then encouraged students to pay $1,495 for a three-day workshop.
Students said they were swept along by the promise that they were getting the best real estate education money could buy, according to interviews and several dozen complaints and sworn affidavits filed with the court. But they claimed that the seminars were another sales pitch: To learn how to make it in real estate, they needed additional workshops and mentoring at a cost of up to $35,000.
Was Trump University a scam? We take a look at the available evidence.
Did Trump University sell itself off as an educational institution?
Yes. Trump himself marketed Trump University as a premier institution of higher learning rivaling Wharton Business School. Trump University had advertisements touting their function as a higher educational entity.
They had course books (that you can still purchase on Amazon) with their course numbers.
Was Trump University a licensed school?
No. A New York judge found Donald Trump was running an unlicensed school and was liable. The New York Department of Education demanded that the name Trump University be changed since it was misleading and in violation of the state’s education laws.
Were the professors the best brains in the industry and hand picked by Donald Trump as he promised?
No. They were hired motivational speakers with limited-to-none real estate background and not picked by Trump. In a deposition in the Cohen case last December, Trump suggested under oath that he was not very involved in hiring instructors, despite the program’s promotional materials suggesting otherwise and his lawyers asserting he was “very involved.” Rather, Trump said, “I would see résumés. … I told [Trump University’s president] I want very good people.” He also said he did not personally select instructors for 2009 live seminars
Did Trump University have a A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau, as Trump claims in his defense.
Yes, Trump University had an ‘A+’ rating from the Better Business Bureau… only after all of the bad reviews and complaints were removed. The policy of the Better Business Bureau is to remove all claims for a company after 3 years. When Trump University was active it had a rating of ‘D-‘. Donald Trump’s defense of an ‘A+’ rating is a clear deception.
Conclusion
Our conclusion based on all of the available evidence is that Trump University is a textbook example of a bait-and-switch scam.
While Trump has bashed the H-1B visa program in multiple debates and makes lowering the number of H-1B visas a top policy decision for his immigration reform.
Increase prevailing wage for H-1Bs. We graduate two times more Americans with STEM degrees each year than find STEM jobs, yet as much as two-thirds of entry-level hiring for IT jobs is accomplished through the H-1B program. More than half of H-1B visas are issued for the program’s lowest allowable wage level, and more than eighty percent for its bottom two. Raising the prevailing wage paid to H-1Bs will force companies to give these coveted entry-level jobs to the existing domestic pool of unemployed native and immigrant workers in the U.S., instead of flying in cheaper workers from overseas. This will improve the number of black, Hispanic and female workers in Silicon Valley who have been passed over in favor of the H-1B program. Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Senator, Marco Rubio, has a bill to triple H-1Bs that would decimate women and minorities.
Requirement to hire American workers first. Too many visas, like the H-1B, have no such requirement. In the year 2015, with 92 million Americans outside the workforce and incomes collapsing, we need companies to hire from the domestic pool of unemployed. Petitions for workers should be mailed to the unemployment office, not USCIS.
Ut-Oh!
Not only was Donald Trump extensively using the H-1B visa program for his own companies, he tried to import at least 1,100 foreign workers, and he has been accused of fraud and treating models at his model agency “like a slave.”
