The flimflan man...
Trump ordered to expand document search in suit alleging he endorsed pyramid scam
By Shayna Jacobs
March 14, 2020 at 2:07 p.m. EDT
NEW YORK — President Trump and three of his adult children have been ordered by a federal judge to search through 15 years of business records for materials that could inform a lawsuit alleging they profited by promoting a marketing scam targeting vulnerable investors.
Trump is being sued by four people who say they were duped into joining the multilevel marketing company ACN years ago because of his endorsement. The suit characterizes ACN as a pyramid scheme and accuses Trump of having made misleading claims as a paid pitchman prior to his presidency. All four say they suffered financially as a result.
The order on Friday by U.S. District Court Judge Lorna Schofield allows the plaintiffs to look further into the Trump Organization’s history — to 2005 — for others who may have been involved in the president’s deal with ACN.
The suit, filed in Manhattan federal court, dates to October 2018. Racketeering claims were dismissed but state-level fraud charges were allowed to proceed and the document-production process known as discovery is well underway. That could turn up names of people at the president’s family-run real estate company and other entities under its control whom the plaintiffs could seek to depose.
“We look forward to working with defendants,” attorney Roberta Kaplan said in a statement.
“We continue to make every effort to gather the evidence we need to obtain justice for our brave clients, and the thousands of other Americans just like them who were defrauded by the Trumps.”
A lawyer for Trump, Joanna Hendon, did not respond to a request for comment on the judge’s order.
The president faces the possibility of testifying under oath in several personal lawsuits, matters that could prove problematic for him politically if he’s forced to discuss them publicly in the run-up to November’s election. He was served with a notice in this case to be deposed at the White House on May 1 and “continuing from day to day thereafter until completed,” according to a court filing. Kaplan’s team has said it would accommodate the president’s demanding schedule.
His lawyers have not yet responded to the notice but are likely to seek a delay.
In this case, unlike in others, he has not asserted presidential immunity as a defense, and his legal team has already turned over a number of documents.
more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-ordered-to-expand-document-search-in-suit-alleging-he-endorsed-pyramid-scam/2020/03/14/c903fa0e-6579-11ea-acca-80c22bbee96f_story.html
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