Photo by Jay Greinsky

Donald Trump’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination rests on the notion, relentlessly promoted by the candidate himself, that his record of business deals has prepared him better than his rivals for running the country. But an examination of legal maneuvers around a 46-story luxury Trump condominium-hotel in Lower Manhattan provides a window into his handling of one such deal and finds that decisions on important matters like whom to become partners with and how to market the project led him into a thicket of litigation and controversy, writes Mike McIntire for The New York Times.

The buyers of some units asserted that they had been defrauded by inflated claims made by Trump, his children and others of brisk sales in the struggling project. Contrary to his claims that he rarely settles litigation, he and his co-defendants settled the case in November 2011, agreeing to refund 90 percent of $3.16 million in deposits, while admitting no wrongdoing.

A separate lawsuit claimed that Trump SoHo was developed with the undisclosed involvement of convicted felons and financing from questionable sources in Russia and Kazakhstan, the report states.

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Donald Trump’s prediction that the U.S. economy was on the verge of a “very massive recession” hit a wall of skepticism from economists who questioned the Republican presidential front-runner’s calculations, reports Reuters.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Washington Post published on Saturday, the billionaire businessman said a combination of high unemployment and an overvalued stock market had set the stage for another economic slump. He put real unemployment above 20 percent, Reuters said.

“There is a very low probability of a massive recession, less than 10 percent,” said Sung Won Sohn, an economics professor at California State University Channel Islands in Camarillo. “If it happens, it would be because of what is happening overseas, especially in China and Europe.”

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The colorful litigator who represented the late “D.C. madam” Deborah Palfrey and threatened this week to release call logs of his former client that he says are “very relevant” to the 2016 presidential election says those records already are digitized and posted online, reports U.S. News.

The report says Montgomery Blair Sibley threatened that the records will become public if he fails to reset a 72-hour countdown clock, which could cut short his soft two-week ultimatum for federal courts to consider lifting a 2007 gag order that covers the records, lest he deem that order void.

“The records are stored on four servers around the world, Sibley says, and dozens of reporters will receive a website link if the clock is not reset. He says he loaded the information online in January, when he decided to publicly claim the records are relevant to the presidential race,” writes Steven Nelson.

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Four of Hillary Clinton’s closest aides appear to have adopted an unusual legal strategy, hiring the same ex-Justice Department attorney to represent them in the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s private email server, reports Politico.

“The united front suggests they plan to tell investigators the same story — although legal experts say the joint strategy presents its own risks, should the interests of the four aides begin to diverge as the probe moves ahead,” writes Rachael Bade.

She explains that the aides’ decision to use a so-called “joint-representation” or “common-defense” strategy suggests the staffers believe they’re in this together and are unlikely to turn on each other.

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Photo by Michael Vadon

Less than 24 hours after Donald Trump threatened to sue for votes ahead of a potentially contested GOP nominating convention, a move that could foreshadow a new phase in the GOP’s ugly primary fight, his campaign backed down, reports Time.

A Trump senior advisor later said that Trump’s “lawsuit” was not in fact meant for a court of law, but for the Republican National Committee’s committee on contests — which under GOP rules hears complaints over the allocation and selection of delegates.

“It’s clear why. Election lawyers and party operatives said challenges to the arcane state-by-state delegate selection rules being used to outfox Trump would face an unwelcome reception in court,” the report says.

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A second federal judge in Washington ruled Tuesday that a conservative legal watchdog group may question the State Department and potentially several top aides to Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton about her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, reports The Washington Post.

U.S. District Senior Judge Royce C. Lamberth granted a request from Judicial Watch, which has sought public records of talking points used by Susan E. Rice, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, in television appearances after the deadly Sept. 11, 2012, attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya.

“His decision came about five weeks after another federal judge in Washington, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, ruled that current and former top State Department and Clinton aides could be questioned under oath about her email arrangement in a separate Judicial Watch FOIA case,” the newspaper says.

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Trump University isn’t the only Donald Trump endeavor that has landed in court, reports Mother Jones magazine.

“The tycoon has launched — or lent his name to — a slew of business ventures that have yielded frustrated customers and investors who have sought legal recourse. There are hundreds of lawsuits extending over 43 years that name Trump or one of his businesses,” says the magazine.

The report includes a list of some of those legal skirmishes that began when Trump joined his father’s business and continue through his run for the GOP nomination, such as Trump Management, Trump Tower, Trump’s Atlantic City casinos, Trump SoHo, Trump Baja, Trump Model Management, and more.

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As Donald Trump rolls through the political calendar, his campaign has already begun focusing on a new battle that may have a broader set of consequences — finding delegates who will be loyal to his cause at the Republican National Convention, reports ABC News.

“Part of the battle has come in the form of emails to delegates and supporters trying to lock down crucial votes. The other half is a five-person task force that has been quietly being trying to amass the 1,237 votes needed,” the network reports.

“Emails obtained by ABC News show the Trump campaign calling on supporters in Michigan to watch for precinct-level delegates who may defect to a rival candidate during a contested convention”

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Now that Marco Rubio is out of the race, for the first time in U.S. political history, every presidential candidate — of both parties — supports at least states’ rights to do as they please with regard to marijuana legalization, according to a report in Rolling Stone.

Bernie Sanders, who pledges to end the drug war, is the most progressive on marijuana policy. And fellow Democrat supports states’ rights to legalize, but proposes to reschedule instead of deschedule cannabis, the newspaper says.

Donald Trump believes there should be more research on cannabis. Ted Cruz says he would not support legalization, but he believes states have a right to determine the legality for themselves. John Kasich also is opposed to marijuana use, but would defer to states’ rights, the report says.

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“By paying those (legal) fees, wouldn’t you be rewarding and encouraging violence?” asked host George Stephanopoulos.

“No, no I didn’t say that. I haven’t looked at it yet, and nobody’s asked me to pay for fees, and somebody asked me a question and I haven’t even seen it, so I never said I was going to pay for fees,” the Republican front-runner said, at first denying what he has said both during a campaign rally and on Sunday during an interview, according to the report on CNN.

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What Donald Trump says on the campaign trail might be crass, blunt and offensive but does it cross the legal line and make him liable for inciting violence? His critics point to a few examples like when he told a crowd at a February rally: “So if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of ’em, would you?”

Under the First Amendment, writes Rachel Stockman on LawNews.com, an effort to prosecute a politician on such a charge would be an uphill battle.

“I have little doubt that Trump’s language and general comportment does incite some of his followers to violent behavior, in the way we might use that word in lay English,” First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams told LawNewz.com. However, legal liability is a different story. Abrams also pointed out that speech must be intentionally done to incite violence.

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ABC News is reporting that Donald Trump and his campaign are not expected to face inciting a riot charges in connection with a violent incident at a rally in Fayetteville, NC.

The Cumberland County Sheriff’s office had been investigating the real estate mogul and his campaign but decided “that the evidence does not meet the requisites of the law as established under the relevant North Carolina statute and case law to support a conviction of the crime of inciting a riot,” the report says, quoting from a sheriff’s department statement.

A man who attended the rally last weeek allegedly sucker-punched a protester in the face as he was being escorted out of the venue. John Franklin McGraw, 78, faces charges of assault and disorderly conduct.

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Photo by Brian Solis, www.briansolis.com and bub.blicio.us

Dallas billionaire Mark Cuban is talking politics again, reports The Dallas Morning News. And while he’s not endorsing GOP front runner Donald Trump, Cuban does believe a candidate with a business background is better qualified than a politician.

When he appeared on CBS’ The Late Late Show with James Corden on Thursday, the owner of the Mavericks NBA team said he likes the fact that Trump doesn’t worry about being politically correct, the report says.

“Like, before all the presidential stuff, he was like that friend everybody had that you liked to pick on,” Cuban said. “In person, he’s nice. But now, he’s gone crazy. I can’t explain what’s happened to him.”

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Photo by Michael Vadon

An alleged assault of a protester at a Donald Trump rally by a man who was later arrested after saying that the protester “deserved it” and “next time, we might have to kill him,” is only the latest in a series of violent and frightening incidents at Trump rallies of late, reports Vanity Fair.

Last week, some two dozen Black Lives Matter protesters were forcibly expelled from a Trump event in New Orleans, following a week in which the Republican front-runner initially refused to condemn the Ku Klux Klan and former K.K.K. leader David Duke.

Other incidents occured at a Trump rally in Georgia, in Louisville, and at a rally in Las Vegas where Trump said that he’d like to punch one protester in the face, reminiscing about the “good old days” when agitators would be carried out on a stretcher, the magazine reports.

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There is good evidence that the founding fathers would have understood the words “natural born citizen” to mean only people born within a nation’s borders, but there’s also strong evidence on the other side of the debate, according to an article published by ThinkProgress.

Harvard University Law Professor Laurence Tribe, for example, wrote in a newspaper op-ed piece that “the constitutional definition of a ‘natural born citizen’ is completely unsettled,” and then he claims that, under the method of constitutional interpretation Cruz preferred when he was Tribe’s student, Cruz “wouldn’t be eligible, because the legal principles that prevailed in the 1780s and ’90s required that someone actually be born on US soil to be a ‘natural born” citizen.’”

But two former United States Solicitors cite the Naturalization Act of 1790, which states that children born outside of the country, but with parents who are U.S. citizens, are natural born citizens themselves.

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