Public Citizen, a left-leaning watchdog group, on Monday asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Trump’s involvement in a multi-level marketing company that he allegedly took money from until four months before declaring his run for the presidency.
The group wants a probe into whether Trump engaged in “deceptive advertising” while shilling for the American Communications Network, a North Carolina-based company that was accused of being a pyramid scheme in an October 2018 lawsuit.
In a letter to FTC chairman Joseph Simons, the group accused Trump of claiming that he was endorsing ACN “not for the money” while receiving “millions of dollars to promote the company.”
“Undertaking an investigation of Mr. Trump would instill confidence in the public that the FTC takes deceptive advertising seriously,” the group wrote.
Trump promoted the company from 2005 to 2015, featuring them on “The Apprentice” and discussing the firm in interviews. Across those appearances, Trump repeatedly stated that he wasn’t taking money to tout the company and referred to ACN execs as “friends of mine.”
“No reasonable viewer, especially after being told that the ACN executives were ‘friends of mine’ would expect that the reason for ACN’s presence on ‘The Apprentice’ was because they paid Mr. Trump,” Public Citizen wrote in the letter.
The demand comes weeks after Trump and his children were hit with a lawsuit in New York accusing them of secretly taking “millions of dollars” from ACN to convince people to sign onto the company. That litigation is reportedly being funded by the Tesseract Research Center, a liberal group.
Trump doing business with another company for free?
And I believe him when he says he’s a stable genius, too!
The fact pattern alleged in the lawsuit is pretty much a slam dunk if accurate. Repeatedly said he wasn’t being paid to endorse, strongly implied he had vetted the investment.
It might save time if you simply reported the scams that Trump is NOT involved with…
Every advancement in communication has been a boon to hucksters, expanding their audience while putting distance between them and those they fleeced. Law enforcement is rarely interested in ripoffs, if nobody is getting physically harmed, and civil cases are non-starters until a lot of money is involved and then only if the perpetrators have not been careful about putting their assets out of legal reach.
In simpler times…
When I saw the headline, I assumed that the request related to tRump’s bombast since the inauguration. Sadly, no.