Lesson for the day: don't fuck with judges

The Washington Post has an article by Tom Hamburger about Trump's legal problems:

A Federal judge has ordered the release of internal Trump University documents in an ongoing lawsuit against the company, including “playbooks” that advised sales personnel how to market high-priced courses on getting rich through real estate.
The ruling, in which Judge Gonzalo Curiel cited heightened public interest in presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, was issued in response to a request by The Washington Post. The ruling was a setback for Trump, whose attorneys argued that the documents contained trade secrets.
Curiel’s order came the same day that Trump railed against the judge at a boisterous San Diego, California rally for his handling of the case, in which students have alleged they were misled and defrauded. The trial is set for November.
Trump, who previously questioned whether Curiel’s Hispanic heritage made him biased due to Trump’s support for building a wall on the Mexican border, said that Curiel “happens to be, we believe, Mexican.” Trump called the judge a “hater of Donald Trump” who had “railroaded” him in the case. “I think Judge Curiel should be ashamed of himself. I think it’s a disgrace that he is doing this, “ he said.
In his order, Curiel noted that Trump had emerged as a leading presidential candidate over the course of the civil case against Trump University, and that Trump had “placed the integrity of these court proceedings at issue”. The judge pointed to a previous case to say that courts deciding on public disclosure must weigh “whether a party benefitting from the order of confidentiality is a public entity or official; and whether the case involves issues important to the public.”
Trump University was started in 2004 to offer courses in entre­pre­neur­ship under the Trump brand. Trump gave his blessing, according to court documents reported previously by The Post, becoming a nearly full owner of the new enterprise.
Two class action lawsuits being considered in San Diego have accused Trump University of using deceptive practices, as it brought in millions of dollars from customers who were told they would learn Trump’s techniques to become successful in the world of real estate. Trump and his attorneys have vigorously denied the fraud claims, pointing to high ratings that students gave their courses at the time.
The Post intervened in April of 2016, arguing that Trump’s pursuit of the presidency made his business dealings a matter of public interest, and that an inactive company had no compelling reason to maintain secrecy.
Some of the firm’s internal documents previously became public. A 2010 “playbook” published by Politico, for instance, directed sales people to rank students based on their liquid assets to determine who to target for buying courses.
Trump and his attorneys have said the company would return in some form after the case is resolved, and that it would be damaged by the release of the marketing material.
Curiel seemed unconvinced. Trump’s “assertion that the information retains any commercial value is speculative given the lack of any support for the statement that Trump University ‘may’ resume operations,” the order said.
Curiel ordered that the playbooks and other records, numbering about a thousand pages, be released by 2 June 2016, allowing time to redact telephone numbers and other personal information about the company.
In addition to the class action cases, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman filed a forty million dollar lawsuit in 2013, alleging that Trump had defrauded more than five thousand individuals through Trump University, which was never licensed as an educational institution. Schneiderman alleged in the suit that Trump personally earned five million dollars from the enterprise, in which sales personnel were assigned to get people to pay fifteen hundred dollars for a three-day seminar in real estate techniques. In selling the courses, Trump released a marketing video that said: “We are going to have professors and adjunct professors that are absolutely terrific, and these are all people who are going to be handpicked by me.”
One of the university’s top executives, Michael Sexton, subsequently testified in one of the class action suits that “none of the professors at the live events” were handpicked by Trump. Depositions released in March of 2016 quote Trump acknowledging a lack of close involvement with mentors and students.
The fraud allegations were highlighted during this year’s campaign for the GOP presidential nomination by some of Trump’s competitors and by a super PAC that opposed Trump.
Campaign and legal representatives for Trump could not be reached for comment. However, Jill A. Martin, vice president and assistant general counsel for the Trump Organization, said in a written statement that the allegations had “no substance”. She added that “Trump University was a professionally-run company which provided students with a valuable and substantive education and the tools to succeed in business and real estate.”

Rico says the whole enterprise was as phony as Trump himself...