Strangelove wrote: ↑Thu Oct 17, 2019 4:07 pm
Cornuck wrote: ↑Thu Oct 17, 2019 4:04 pm
Vs your ASSumption that trump is an honest man!
It's called "benefit of the doubt"!
... or perhaps gullibility...
In late 1990, Trump was sued for $2 million by a business analyst for defamation, and Trump settled out of court. Briefly before Trump's Taj Mahal opened in April 1990, the analyst had said that the project would fail by the end of that year. Trump threatened to sue the analyst's firm unless the analyst recanted or was fired. The analyst refused to retract the statements, and his firm fired him for ostensibly unrelated reasons. Trump Taj Mahal declared bankruptcy in November 1990, the first of several such bankruptcies. After, the NYSE ordered the firm to compensate the analyst $750,000; the analyst did not release the details of his settlement with Trump.
In 2009, Trump was sued by investors who had made deposits for condos in the canceled Trump Ocean Resort Baja Mexico. The investors said that Trump misrepresented his role in the project, stating after its failure that he had been little more than a spokesperson for the entire venture, disavowing any financial responsibility for the debacle. Investors were informed that their investments would not be returned due to the cancellation of construction. In 2013, Trump settled the lawsuit with more than one hundred prospective condo owners for an undisclosed amount.
In October 2016, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that Trump, together with two principals of a connected developer, could be sued for various claims, including oppression, collusion and breach of fiduciary duties, in relation to his role in the marketing of units in the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Toronto, Canada.
In 2013, in a lawsuit filed by New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman, Trump was accused of defrauding more than 5,000 people of $40 million for the opportunity to learn Trump's real estate investment techniques in a for-profit training program, Trump University, which operated from 2005 to 2011. Trump ultimately stopped using the term "University" following a 2010 order from New York regulators, who called Trump's use of the word "misleading and even illegal"; the state had previously warned Trump in 2005 to drop the term or not offer seminars in New York. Although Trump has claimed a 98% approval rating on course evaluations, former students recounted high-pressure tactics from instructors seeking the highest possible ratings, including threats of withholding graduation certificates, and more than 2,000 students had sought and received course refunds before the end of their paid seminars.
In a separate class action civil suit against Trump University in mid-February 2014, a San Diego federal judge allowed claimants in California, Florida, and New York to proceed; a Trump counterclaim, alleging that the state attorney general's investigation was accompanied by a campaign donation shakedown, was investigated by a New York ethics board and dismissed in August 2015. Trump filed a $1 million defamation suit against former Trump University student Tarla Makaeff, who had spent about $37,000 on seminars, after she joined the class action lawsuit and publicized her classroom experiences on social media.[85] Trump University was later ordered by a U.S. district judge in April 2015 to pay Makaeff and her lawyers $798,774.24 in legal fees and costs. Donald Trump was found to have defrauded students, and was forced to pay $25 million in restitution.
In a December 7, 2018 sentencing memorandum for Cohen, federal prosecutors implicated Trump in directing Cohen to commit the campaign finance law felonies for which Cohen had pleaded guilty. Shortly after the memorandum court filing, Trump tweeted, “Totally clears the president. Thank you!” Cohen was sentenced to three years in federal prison.
Trump helped a financier for the Scarfo family get a casino license, and constructed a casino using firms controlled by Nicodemo Scarfo. Trump also bought real estate from Philadelphia crime family member Salvatore Testa, and bought concrete from companies associated with the Genovese crime family and the Gambino crime family. Trump Plaza paid a $450,000 fine leveled by the Casino Gaming Commission for giving $1.6 million in rare automobiles to Robert LiButti, the acquaintance of John Gotti already mentioned.
Starting in 2003, the Trump Organization worked with Felix Sater, who had a 1998 racketeering conviction for a $40 million stock fraud scheme orchestrated by the Russian mafia, and who had then become an informant against the mafia.
Regarding the various irregularities in the Trump Foundation, former head of the Internal Revenue Service's Office of Exempt Organizations Division Marc Owens told The Washington Post: "This is so bizarre, this laundry list of issues.... It's the first time I've ever seen this, and I've been doing this for 25 years in the IRS, and 40 years total. When interviewed for the Post's article, Trump spokesperson Boris Epshtein said that Trump did not knowingly violate any tax laws.
The office of New York State attorney general Eric Schneiderman investigated the foundation "to make sure it's complying with the laws governing charities in New York." The Trump Foundation was in fact found to have committed fraud and misappropriated funds, and was ordered to be shut down.
In 1973 Trump, his father and their company were in court for civil charges for refusing to rent apartments to African Americans. After their lawyers had delayed court requests for documents for several months, Trump, then being under subpoena, said his company had destroyed corporate records of the past six months "for saving space". In a court case beginning in 2005 against Power Plant Entertainment, LLC, an affiliate of real estate developer Cordish Cos., it was revealed that Trump's companies had deleted the data requested by court. Cordish Cos. had built two American Indian casinos in Florida under the Hard Rock brand and Donald Trump accused them of cheating him out of that deal. Nonetheless, Trump's lawyers had refused to instruct workers to keep all records related to the case during litigation. Trump had established a procedure to delete all data from their employees' computers every year at least since 2003, despite knowing at least since 2001 that he might want to file a lawsuit. Even after the lawsuit was filed, Trump Hotels disposed of a computer of a key witness without having made a backup of the data. A former general counsel of the Trump casino unit confirmed that all data were deleted from nearly all companies' computers annually. Trump and his lawyers claimed they were not keeping records and digital data although it was revealed that Trump had launched his own high-speed internet provider in 1998 and an IBM Domino server had been installed for emails and digital files in 1999.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_aff ... nald_Trump