The Ashford Zone Blog

There are many reasons why Donald Trump is panicking as he faces the election but the disintegration of the Trump Organization grift has to be a big one. It’s possible that he’ll attempt to build a new media empire but I would bet money that it will implode in about a tenth of the time Glenn Beck’s did. If Trump’s post-presidency follows previous wingnut celebrity cults it will disintegrate once he’s no longer prominent. I have a feeling his support is totally tribal and once he’s no longer relevant to the tribe, they’ll run in the opposite direction.

And all of this will be waiting for him:

A federal judge sitting in the Southern District of New York has refused to stay a lawsuit alleging that Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, and the Trump Corporation committed “various business torts,” including engaging in an illegal pyramid scheme.

The complicated and anonymous class action lawsuit, filed by a Jane Doe and others, resulted in motions to stay the proceedings and interlocutory appeals by the Trumps, the Trump Corporation, and a third party called ACN Opportunity, LLC. ACN was ordered to produce documents relevant to the claims. Interlocutory appeals are appeals to higher courts filed in the midst, rather than at the conclusion, of lower court litigation.

The judge, Lorna G. Schofield, a Barack Obama appointee, said the lawsuit would not be put on hold.

The lawsuit, originally filed in Oct. 2018 as an anti-“racketeering enterprise” action, was later streamlined. The class sued on various state and federal charges–including “racketeering and conspiracy to racketeer” claims. The two federal claims were dismissed by the court after the Trump family filed for a broad dismissal in January 2019. But the case is yet living.

The class action plaintiffs allege that the Trump family business promoted a multi-level marketing, or pyramid, scheme known as ACN Opportunity, LLC. ACN, the plaintiffs said, was a “get-rich-quick scheme” that relied on Trump and his family “conn[ing] each of these victims into giving up hundreds or thousands of dollars,” in violation of various state laws. […]

The plaintiffs claimed that the Trump family falsely endorsed and promoted ACN by insisting that the enterprise “offered a reasonable probability of commercial success”—even using The Celebrity Apprentice to draw them in:

Between 2005 and at least 2015, Defendants promoted and endorsed ACN through videos, print and online media, at ACN events, and during episodes of The Celebrity Apprentice, a television program hosted by Trump and featuring Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr. Defendants’ endorsement of ACN was crucial to Plaintiffs’ decisions to become [Independent Business Owners (IBOS)] for at least two related reasons. First, Plaintiffs considered Trump and his family highly successful in business. Second, Plaintiffs believed that the endorsement was independent of ACN.

According to the lawsuit, ACN was paying the Trumps for the above-described exposure but this was not public knowledge.

Schofield walked the case through the “traditional standard” for determining whether to stay litigation. The first factor is whether the parties applying for the stay — the Trumps and ACN — are likely to succeed on the merits.  Here, Schofield ruled that they are not, and for several reasons.

The first reason the Trumps and ACN are not likely to succeed — here, in an interlocutory appeal — is because they attempted to force the case into arbitration “despite the absence of any written agreement between” the parties which required arbitration. “The fundamental rule of arbitration is that arbitration is a matter of contract and a party cannot be required to submit to arbitration any dispute which he has not agreed so to submit,” the judge said (internal quotations and citations omitted).  The judge also said that a narrow exception to that rule did not apply in this case because the “Plaintiffs were duped about the nature of the relationship between ACN and Defendants.” Second, the defendants — the Trumps and ACN — “waived their right to arbitrate by delaying their motion to compel arbitration.” 

In other words, the Trumps, their business, and ACN botched the case, and the likelihood that they will succeed in an interlocutory appeal is low.

There is more at the link about why the Trumps are unlikely to prevail. Let’s hope that’s true. But I would imagine that they are going to be inundated with similar lawsuits for the foreseeable future (just as they were before) but their properties are going to be huge money losers and his brand is destroyed. After all, his rich supporters are only spending at his holdings to curry favor with the powerful and there will be social costs to continuing to do that if he’s out of office. (Anyway, why bother? There are much better properties.) And whatever is left of the true believers can’t afford his golf resorts and hotels.

They’ll carry on for a while with the dregs of MAGA and, as I said, they’ll almost assuredly try to start a media empire, probably based on OAN. But I suspect they are going to end up bankrupt in the end and their followers won’t really care much.

He and his family of grifters will be outcasts even among the former true believers. Right-wingers don’t like “losers.” Trump may be a moron but he understands that much.

Steve Linick, the State Department inspector general Trump fired last week, was investigating whether Pompeo made a staffer perform a variety of personal errands, including walking his dog, picking up dry cleaning and making a dinner reservation for him and his wife. A senior State Department official previously confirmed to CNN that Pompeo recommended Linick be removed, but they did not know the reasons why.

But the Pompeo scandal just got much more real. It turns out he and Trump may have fired the State Department Inspector General for more reasons than just the fact that he was investigating the Pompeos’ use of government employees as their personal servants.

Ousted State Department Inspector General Steve Linick was investigating Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s decision to greenlight arms sales to Saudi Arabia against the will of Congress when he was abruptly removed from his post, congressional officials tell NBC News.

The probe into the Saudi arms sale is the second known investigation into Pompeo’s activities that Linick is known to have been pursuing when he was fired by President Donald Trump on Friday evening, in a letter to Congress explaining that the administration no longer had confidence in Linick. The inspector general was also looking into allegations Pompeo enlisted a political appointee to perform personal chores like picking up dry cleaning, NBC News previously reported.

Three officials from different congressional committees say investigators on Capitol Hill believe that Linick’s investigations into the Saudi arms sale and Pompeo’s use of the political aide contributed to his firing. A White House official has said that Pompeo recommended to Trump that Linick be fired, and that Trump agreed.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., confirmed Monday that Linick was looking into the Saudi arms deal.

“His office was investigating — at my request — Trump’s phony declaration of an emergency so he could send weapons to Saudi Arabia,” Engel said in a statement. “We don’t have the full picture yet, but it’s troubling that Secretary Pompeo wanted Mr. Linick pushed out before this work could be completed.”

Engel urged the Trump administration to comply with a request for related records jointly issued late last week by Engel’s committee and by Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The State Department and Pompeo’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But in brief excerpts from a forthcoming interview with The Washington Post, posted by the reporter to Twitter, Pompeo said the inspector general “wasn’t performing a function in a way that we had tried to get him to” and was “trying to undermine what it was that we were trying to do.”

Trump in May 2019 issued an emergency declaration, using Iran concerns as the basis, that allowed the administration to sell billions in arms to the Saudis despite opposition from both parties in Congress following atrocities in Riyadh’s military effort in Yemen, the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and other concerns about Saudi Arabia. The total for that tranche of sales to both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates was about $8 billion.

That emergency declaration enabled Pompeo to expedite the arms to the Saudis without the typical congressional notification process, in which Congress has a window to block proposed foreign military sales that it opposes.

“Today’s action will quickly augment our partners’ capacity to provide for their own self-defense and reinforce recent changes to U.S. posture in the region to deter Iran,” Pompeo said in a May 24 statement announcing the emergency notification.

But lawmakers from both parties have maintained there was no legitimate emergency to justify sidestepping Congress by authorizing the arms sale, arguing that it’s unclear how the weapons could even help Saudi Arabia defend itself against Iran, which has long preferred asymmetric warfare and use of proxy groups to actual military-to-military conflict with its enemies.

Linick’s firing has prompted bipartisan concern on Capitol Hill, with Democrats calling it clear retaliation and many Republicans taking the milder approach of saying that the administration has failed to offer a specific rationale for why he was removed. One Republican who has frequently sparred with Trump, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, called Linick’s removal “a threat to accountable democracy.”

Interfering with King Trump’s relationship with the “prince” simply isn’t done.

To all those who say that congress can always use their “power of the purse” to stop the president from abusing his power — well, it’s not so easy, is it?

Remember, Iran contra was partly about this very thing. Bill Barr recomended that Bush Sr pardon all the people involved and he did. They don’t believe that congress has any power over a Republican president, ever.