today.
Barney has donated $924,600 to the Trump 47 Committee, according to federal records.
Like Donald Trump, who in 2016 paid $25 million to settle civil charges by New York’s attorney general that his unaccredited real estate school, Trump University, defrauded its students, Barney saw his schools shut down after law enforcement agencies and former students went to court over claims of deceptive practices.
Barney explained his reasons for supporting Trump in a fascinating
post last month on his personal website.
According to Barney, Trump “approaches the job of President as a businessman, not a politician,” which Barney sees as “mostly a major strength.”
“I’m aware of President Trump’s shortcomings,” Barney acknowledges, “but I won’t criticize him here. (If you want criticism, you’ll find all you need in the popular ‘news’ media.)”
Barney evaluates Trump’s term in office and concludes that the ex-president “significantly improved the individual freedom of Americans to pursue their goals with less government hindrance.”
While Barney concedes that he does not like Trump’s “proposed tariffs and some of his economics,” he likes that Trump “wants to work with Elon Musk to reduce spending, regulations, waste, and fraud in the federal government.
What doesn’t Barney like about Kamala Harris? A number of things, but he zeroes in on this: “Kamala Harris is an avowed enemy of private career colleges and boasts about closing them. Her boasts reveal her disregard for the schools’ students and teachers, as well as the entrepreneurs and investors who created the schools.” Harris, Barney concludes, “holds the anti-freedom values common to radical leftists.” He warns, “These people hate profit, business, and businessmen.”
Barney prepares his audience for the attacks he will face for his endorsement. “Since my contribution to President Trump will be public,” he writes, “I know that I will become more of a political target than I’ve been over the last 10 years. I’ve been a target of trolls, lawfare, and political operatives who finally destroyed my beautiful colleges. I know they will now target me with renewed force and energy. That’s something I will have to confront.”
Barney concludes his post with this unifying message, “If anyone sees something wrong with Making America Great Again (MAGA), then they’re not friends of mine, nor of yours.”
While Barney’s focus on Harris’s role in taking on abusive for-profit colleges is no surprise, his identification of fighting government waste, fraud, and abuse as a key policy priority for him is particularly rich, given his role in running a college operation, the Center for Excellence in Higher Education (CEHE), that received billions in federal taxpayer dollars and ultimately was found liable for deceiving students — and given his schools’ troubling conversion to tax-free non-profit status in a deal that increased his staggering wealth.
In August 2020, following an extensive trial, a Colorado state court sided with that state’s attorney general and found CEHE, its CollegeAmerica school, Carl Barney, and CEHE CEO Eric Juhlin
liable for deceptive practices and awarded a $3 million judgment.
The Colorado court found that Barney’s schools used a detailed playbook to manipulate vulnerable students into enrolling in high-priced, low-quality programs; that the schools directed admissions representatives to “enroll every student,” regardless of whether the student would likely graduate; that the schools’ recruiters and advertisements greatly overstated starting salaries that graduates could earn; and that the schools falsely inflated graduation rates.
In April 2021, Independence’s accreditor, ACCSC,
ended its approval of Independence University, which by then was CEHE’s main school, effectively repealing its eligibility for federal student grants and loans. Soon after, the U.S. Department of Education restricted the flow of such aid. In the wake of those developments,
CEHE shut down classes and laid off most staff.
CEHE and the Colorado attorney general’s office were
back in the state trial court in Denver this week, after high-priced lawyers for Barney pursued an appeal to the Colorado Supreme Court that resulted in an order requiring the trial judge to make some additional findings.
Barney also used clever lawyers and accountants to
keep making big money off the CEHE schools even after he converted them to non-profit status. When for-profit operations are converted to non-profit in such a manner, U.S. taxpayers can pay a big price.
Although its schools are shuttered, CEHE still faces additional legal challenges. The U.S. Justice Department is moving ahead with a
long-pending lawsuit in which it has joined whistleblowers in pursuing False Claims Act fraud charges against the schools. The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has pursued a separate
investigation into CEHE’s private loan practices.
CEHE, despite the probes, bad publicity, and collapse of its schools, has
continued trying to collect the high-interest private loan debt it created for its broke
former students.
And CEHE has portrayed itself as a victim of a political conspiracy against it, with ongoing
vitriol on Twitter from former CEO
Eric Juhlin, whom the Department of Education took the rare step of
suspending from federal contracting. More attacks on CEHE critics,
and the Colorado attorney general office and court, have come from Barney.
Barney has
charged on his
grievance-heavy blog that the case brought by the Colorado AG against his schools is a “horror story of government corruption,” and “a multi-agency collusion to put schools out of business” — a supposed plot that involved not only a senior assistant Colorado attorney general, but also the executive director of accreditor ACCSC, officials of the U.S. Department of Eduction, and “the cabal of progressive haters of private colleges (David Halperin, Robert Shireman, entities funded by Arnold Ventures, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and Sen. Richard Durbin).”
In December 2022,
CEHE took its grievance campaign to a new low by
suing the United States government for $500 million in the U.S. Court of Claims, asserting, as a press release statement by Juhlin contended, that the Department of Education “in coordination with ideological confederates… has been on a campaign to cripple and close as many private career colleges as possible” and that CEHE’s schools were “a victim of this campaign.”
As we
reported yesterday, billionaire Betsy DeVos, who
helped Barney and other predatory college operators as Donald Trump’s secretary of education but resigned over Trump’s incitement of the deadly January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, recently donated $250,000 to America PAC, the pro-Trump super PAC created by Musk.
