Bloomberg’s Joshua Green: Marco Rubio Exposed ‘Big Weakness’ on Support for College Chain Defrauding the Government, Students

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Bloomberg News reporter Joshua Green told executive chairman and Breitbart News Daily host Stephen K. Bannon that Sen. Marco Rubio may have exposed a “big weakness” by criticizing frontrunner Donald Trump’s Trump university, when he himself asked the federal government to be lenient on a for-profit college chain that engaged in a “predatory lending scheme” — and contributed to a Rubio-aligned PAC.

Sparks flew at the debate between Trump and Rubio, the donor class favorite. “It’s like trying to judge the winner in a WWF battle royal,” said Green, adding there was more excitement in Thursday’s CNN debate than what he’s seen all year. “Rubio finally showed the life he had been lacking in other debates. So I think he well for himself.”

But the question for me is, did anybody who supports Trump drop away after last night? And I’m not sure that they do… It takes a couple of days for the attacks he did last night to shake out from all this. And the immediate effect from the debate was people looking at Trump and thinking, oh, they attacked him for hiring Polish workers, they attacked him for this Trump university thing, but there’s a lot more there. I think Rubio in particular who was very well-briefed, and very aggressive and went after Trump on these Trump university lawsuits — he himself raising that topic I think exposes what should have been but hasn’t been so far a big weakness for Rubio himself, which is he went to bat for the federal government which fined and shut down the biggest for-profit college chain in the country, Corinthian Colleges. Actually, Rubio wrote a letter to the government asking, quote, ‘demonstrate leniency’ towards this college that was literally defrauding the government.

“It’s not clear to me that the only guy who absorbed damage last night was Donald Trump,” Green added.

As Bloomberg News reported in April:

Last summer, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida asked the U.S. Department of Education to “demonstrate leniency” toward Corinthian Colleges by permitting the wealthy for-profit company to continue accessing millions of dollars in federal financial aid while it was cooperating with a federal investigation.

Ten months later, the company shuttered its remaining 28 campuses, instantly displacing some 16,000 students just days after it was fined $30 million by the Department of Education for a scheme involving “confirmed cases of misrepresentation of job placement rates” for as many as 947 students. The decision to close shop came after years of federal and state investigations into the company.

[…]

Corinthian Colleges contributed $5,000 to Rubio’s Reclaim America PAC during the 2014 election cycle, according to the Center For Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan organization that tracks political donations.

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