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Schneiderman: Trump University Fraud 'Pretty Straightforward' by Chris Isidore @CNNMoney March 4, 2016: New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said that evidence of the fraud perpetrated by Trump University is "pretty straightforward." "It [was] a bait and switch scheme," he said on CNN's New Day Friday, defending his and other lawsuits against the school. "He did ads saying my hand-picked instructors will teach you my personal secrets. You just copy what I did and get rich." But Schneiderman said evidence in the case makes clear that Trump was not involved in hiring instructors, and that he didn't create the program's...

That's the provocative thesis advanced by David Bernstein in a new piece for Politico Magazine: If Trump wins the GOP nomination, he will be testing the limits of a strategy that has long haunted the Republican Party. Since the civil rights era, the Republicans have relied heavily upon white male voters in order to overcome a disadvantage among minorities and some subsets of women. Mathematically, that was an easier strategy a half-century ago, when white men dominated the electorate. But as the GOP failed to broaden its coalition and the demographics of America have shifted dramatically, an ever-greater percentage of...

Lerach, who recently emerged from an almost two-year stretch in prison, is greatly responsible for this rigged game. As an attorney who filed hundreds of class-action suits against corporations, he became a bigger fraudster than a lot of the companies he was pursuing. First, he filed many dubious suits, rejoicing when 90 percent of the companies decided to settle for millions of dollars rather than spend the time and money fighting. That stratagem wasn’t illegal, but it was grossly unethical — the classic shakedown. Companies called it getting “Lerached.” Second, Lerach and his firms paid fat kickbacks to shifty characters...

Newt Gingrich has a message for the GOP in Washington: Start taking Donald Trump seriously. Appearing on Fox News after Trump's Saturday win in South Carolina, the former speaker of the House argued that nobody in the Washington Republican political class should kid themselves about Trump's chances any longer. It is a huge night for Donald Trump and nobody should kid themselves. Here's a guy who seven months ago for the first time entered electoral politics, has learned at an extraordinary rate, Gingrich said, pointing to his second-place finish in Iowa and victories in New Hampshire and South Carolina. By...

Right now, the clueless media, who are desperate for the continuation of the Trump-driven ratings boost they have received are gleefully reporting that the race is all but over, Trump has won, get ready for President Hillary. The media does not understand conservatives in the least, and they never have. They have correctly calculated that mounting pretend attacks on Trump increases his standing with his own base of support, which works well to their advantage. But their lack of understanding about conservative voters has led them to look at what Trump has accomplished in the primary thus far, and conclude...

In 2000, 19 months before Sept. 11, 2001, Donald Trump wrote extensively of the terrorism threat the United States was facing. Trump, who at the time was considering a presidential bid on the Reform Party ticket, went so far as to say that an attack on a major U.S. city was not just a probability, but an inevitability. “I really am convinced we’re in danger of the sort of terrorist attacks that will make the bombing of the Trade Center look like kids playing with firecrackers,” wrote Trump in his 2000 book, The America We Deserve. “No sensible analyst rejects...

The GOP pack leader promises to stay in the 2016 race because he ‘NEVER gives up.’ But his business deals show a knack for spotting a coming decline. After sending mixed signals about what might drive him to withdraw from the presidential race, Donald Trump settled on a definitive answer last month: “I’m never dropping out.” The next day, he tweeted, “I’m leading big in every poll and we are going to WIN! Remember, Trump NEVER gives up!” But, like many successful businessmen, the real estate developer and GOP pack leader—who often espouses his disdain for “losers”—does not see every...

Donald Trump says he doesn’t flat out blame former president George W. Bush that the Sept. 11 terror attacks happened on his watch. But he can think of three reasons why one could hold Bush responsible. And, he might add, they are three things a President Trump would do very differently. “You always have to look to the person at the top,” Trump said Saturday in a telephone interview. “Do I blame George Bush? I only say that he was the president at the time, and you know, you could say the buck stops here.” So why might one consider...

Carly Fiorina criticized fellow GOP presidential contenders Ben Carson and Donald Trump for threatening to boycott CNBC's debate. “Well, I think apparently they’re worried about answering questions for three hours,” she told host Megyn Kelly on Fox News’ “The Kelly File” on Thursday night. “For heaven sakes, we have ten candidates on stage,” Fiorina said. "I don’t think three hours is a long time. “They also apparently asked for prepared statements,” she added of Carson and Trump. "You know, prepared statements are what politicians do. “So, honestly, here are two outsiders supposedly. Donald Trump and Ben Carson – they sound...

I’m not asking that rhetorically. I really don’t know the answer. You tell me what’s going on here. Have a look at HuffPo’s table of national polling in the GOP primary. The second debate, Fiorina’s breakout moment, was held on September 16th. In the last poll taken before that day, she was stuck at two percent. The next poll? 22 percent, tied with Trump nationally. She never approached that number again but she hit double digits in various polls afterward, notching 11, 15, 7, 6, 12, and 11 percent in the six surveys that followed. A week after that, at...

When Carly Fiorina ran for U.S. Senate, opponents depicted the former corporate executive as a cold-hearted job killer, using her past statements like a noose around her neck. Americans have no God-given right to a job, said the former Hewlett-Packard chief. When you’re talking about massive layoffs, sometimes they’re warranted. Off-shoring — shipping American jobs overseas — was “right-shoring.” Now, though, running for president, Fiorina has softened her tone, acknowledging the human toll of lost jobs and explaining at greater length and depth the actions she took as a powerful Silicon Valley executive, including overseeing tens of thousands of layoffs....

Carly Fiorina said on Sunday she had plenty of job offers after being fired as the CEO of Hewlett Packard, including posts in the George W. Bush administration, but she decided against them. "I didn’t want to go back to work as a CEO," the Republican presidential contender said on NBC's "Meet the Press," rejecting suggestions her lack of private-sector employment after leaving HP is an indictment of her leadership. "Yes, I was offered many jobs – as a CEO, in the Bush administration. I wanted a break, and then I wanted to give back."

Here is the 218-page opposition research report on Carly Fiorina compiled by political research firm Gragert Jones for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in April 2010.

For those of us that live in California, there’s a palpable deja vu in Carly Fiorina’s declaration to run for president on the Republican ticket. Smatterings of those late night TV advertisements are still sloshing around our brains. Her campaign positions her as the outsider, the embodiment of the American dream. As her website informs us, “Only in the United States of America can a young woman start as a secretary and work to become Chief Executive of one of the largest technology companies in the world.” Implicit in that leap is the kind of power that is a companion...

Fiorina is running as an effective CEO. But when she ran HP, shareholders were unhappy. -snip- But looked at purely as a stock, HP was a real loser for investors when Fiorina ran it, losing about half its value on the market. It’s important to emphasize that the tech-stock bubble peaked and then burst not long after she took the job. Not many tech CEOs of her era could point to a rising stock price. But as Yale School of Management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld argues in a new piece in Politico, HP struggled even relative to the broad stock market...

The more closely voters examine Carly Fiorina’s record as HP’s CEO, the worse she’ll look. -snip- The many, many people who believe she was a disastrous CEO—and that group would include me—observe that she doubled revenue and employment simply by buying a large company, Compaq, in a deal that was a huge loser for HP shareholders. Her claim of going “from a laggard to a leader in every product category” is distinctly odd, since HP was already the overwhelming leader in printers when she arrived, and by the time she left, the company still didn’t dominate any other business. Increasing...

Carly Fiorina’s political future depends on whether she can defend her record as CEO of Hewlett-Packard. The likely GOP presidential candidate is aiming to do just that in her new book Rising to the Challenge, set to be released May 5, a day after the expected launch of her 2016 campaign. Fiorina now claims the company’s decision to fire her in 2005, after a turbulent six-year tenure, was a result of a dysfunctional board of directors and not her leadership. In an interview with The Hill, Fiorina said members of her own board leaked confidential information to the media to...

Presidential hopeful and former Hewlett-Packard HPQ -3.70% CEO Carly Fiorina has built her entire campaign around the fact that she comes from the business world, not politics. “A fish swims in water, it doesn’t know it’s water. It’s not that politicians are bad people, it’s that they’ve been in that system forever,” she said at Wednesday night’s second debate among Republican candidates for the 2016 Presidential Election. The line was consistent with Fiorina’s pitch to voters as a no-nonsense executive who knows how to revitalize the U.S. economy, but to hear one of her chief Republican rivals tell it, the...