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| U.S. President-elect
Donald Trump speaks at election night rally in Manhattan, New York, U.S. REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo |
President-elect
Donald Trump on Saturday defended his decision to settle lawsuits over his Trump
University real estate seminars for $25 million, saying he does not have time
to fight the fraud cases in court now that he is headed to the White House.
The lawsuits cast
a shadow over the Republican’s presidential campaign and led to one of the more
controversial moments of his run for the While House when he claimed the judge
overseeing two of the cases war biased because he was of Mexican ancestry.
While denying any
wrongdoing, Trump agreed on Friday to pay $25 million to settle the lawsuits.
“I settled the
Trump University lawsuit for a small fraction of the potential award because as
President I have to focus on our country,” Trump wrote on Twitter on Saturday
morning.
New York Attorney
General Eric Schneiderman has said over 5,000 students across the country were
defrauded out of about $40 million, so Trump’s settlement of $25 million was
around 60 percent of these estimated damages.
“The ONLY bad
thing about winning the Presidency is that I did not have the time to go
through a long but winning trial on Trump U. Too bad!” He said in a second
tweet.
In announcing the
settlement, Schneiderman said the deal followed repeated refusals by Trump “to
settle for even modest amounts of compensation for the victims of his phony
university.”
In a statement,
Scneiderman called the settlement a “stunning reversal by Donald Trump and a
major victory for the over 6,000 vitims of his fraudulent university.”
Students had
claimed they were they were lured by false promises into paying up to $35,000
to learn Trump’s real estate investing secrets from his hand-picked
instructors. Trump’s lawyers denied this.
The deal covers
three lawsuits relating to Trump University: two class actions suits in
California and a New York case brought by Scneiderman. U.S. District Judge
Gonzalo Curiel in San Diego must still approved the settlement.
During his
election campaign, Trump said that Curiel, who was born in Indiana to Mexican
immigrant parents, could not be impartial because of Trump’s campaign pledge to
build a wall on the U.S. Mexico border to control illegal immigration.
(Reporting Reuters by
Timmothy Mclaughlin in Chicago; Editing by Alistair Bell)
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