Reminder: You Haven't Heard the Last of Trump U.Donald Trump and the art of the seminar scam.
4:44 PM, May 03, 2016 | By Jonathan V. Last
http://www.weeklystandard.com/reminder-you-havent-heard-the-last-of-trump-u./article/2002221/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=t.co&utm_campaign=20160503_TWS-blog-last-of-trump-u-scam-1_twitter&utm_content=TWSIf Donald Trump is the Republican nominee, then a few months from now America may be treated to something it has never seen before: a presidential nominee being called to testify in his own defense while being sued for fraud.
High-information voters are likely to know at least the basics of the Trump University case. Before November, one suspects that everyone in America—or at least everyone in Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina—will be intimate with Donald Trump's "University." Democrats will see to that.
In the meantime, the details of the Trump Institute—the scam which preceded Trump University—are relatively unknown. Yet they are germane, and fascinating, and two reporters at Ars Technica, Joe Mullin and Jonathan Kaminsky, have the goods.
You should read the entire piece. Not just because it will terrify well-meaning Republicans about having made themselves hostage to a political time bomb—but because the actual mechanics of the get-rich-quick schemes are intensely interesting.
Mullin and Kaminsky became interested in these sorts of scams back in 2005, as journalism grad students. They began investigating an outfit called National Grants Conferences (NGC), after seeing ads for the company on late-night TV. NGC put on seminars across the country promising to help people take financial advantage of government grants. NGC's founder, Mike Milin, had followed in the wake of Matthew Lesko (the crazy question mark guy) and built NGC into an empire: Milin had teams running free seminars all across the country, where the marks would then be pushed to spend $999 on "memberships" which would give them books and access to "counselors" to help them feast at the government-grant trough.
Here's Mullin and Kaminsky explaining what the seminars looked like:
