On a day when he seems poised for victories in Republican primaries across the country, Donald Trump suffered another legal setback in a ruling by a New York State appeals court that the state’s attorney general could move forward with a lawsuit seeking $40 million in damages against the businessman for allegedly defrauding students at his now defunct Trump University.

The unanimous ruling by a four-judge panel essentially handed the state’s Democratic attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, a new weapon to pursue Trump in the state’s courts even while the businessman runs for president. After being tied up in legal battles with Trump’s lawyers since 2013, Schneiderman got a green light from the judges to pursue his efforts to recover tuition and other payments made by students to Trump’s school going back six years. Trump’s lawyers had sought to limit their liability to three years. At the same time, the ruling limits efforts by Trump’s lawyers to depose all the students who attended courses there — a move that Schneiderman had argued could bog the case down.

“Today’s decision is a clear victory in our effort to hold Donald Trump and Trump University accountable for defrauding thousands of students,” Schneiderman said in a statement that described the shuttered school as a “sham for-profit college.”

It means, he added, “our entire fraud case can move forward, and confirms that the case is subject to a six-year statute of limitations. As the state’s chief law enforcement officer, my job is to see that perpetrators of fraud are brought to justice.”

“Of course, we think it’s wrong,” Alan Garten, Trump’s chief lawyer, told Yahoo News Tuesday about the judicial ruling. “So we’re going to pursue an appeal.”

The ruling was especially inopportune for Trump given that, in the last few days, as Trump University has turned into a campaign issue, the Republican frontrunner had dismissed the New York attorney general’s lawsuit as essentially over. “That case has been largely won, although they’re appealing,” Trump said on “Meet the Press” Sunday about the Schneiderman lawsuit. “But that case has been largely won by me.”

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Donald Trump speaks during a campaign stop in Columbus, Ohio. (Photo: John Minchillo/AP)



Now, just as the Republican presidential battle heats up — Trump will be fighting legal battles over Trump University on three fronts. He is facing two class-action lawsuits over the school in federal court in San Diego, one of which, as Yahoo News first reported, is headed to trial — possibly as early as later this spring or summer — with Trump on the witness list. A spokesman for Schneiderman said that, based on the ruling today, the attorney general may seek to short-circuit a trial and ask a lower court judge to rule against Trump on summary judgment based on the record already before her.

Trump University was launched by Trump in 2005 with a promotional video in which he claimed, “I can turn anyone into a successful real estate investor, including you,” and direct-mail solicitations in which he wrote, “In just 90 minutes, my handpicked instructors will share my techniques, which took my entire career to develop.” Students were invited to “just copy exactly what I’ve done and get rich.”

Trump has claimed that 98 percent of the students who enrolled in the courses were satisfied. But in today’s ruling, the New York appellate judges cited evidence compiled by Schneiderman that the students, who paid up to $35,000 for the seminars and “mentoring,” received little for their money and that the claim that they would receive mentoring from Trump’s “handpicked experts” was misleading.

Citing Schneiderman’s evidence, the judges wrote, “Trump did not handpick the instructors; indeed, only one of the live-event speakers for Trump University had even ever met Donald Trump. … Similarly, the attorney general stated, Donald Trump never participated in the creation of any instructional content and never reviewed any curricula,” the judges wrote. “The attorney general further maintained that the instructors had been inadequately vetted and in fact had little or no experience in real estate investing, instead having prior work experience such as food-service management and graphic design.”

In his “Meet the Press” interview on Sunday, Trump complained that the federal judge who refused to dismiss the California cases, Gonzalo Curiel, was biased against him because he was Hispanic. The four judges who ruled against him in the New York case were David B. Saxe, Angelo Mazzarelli, Diane Renwick and Karla Moskowitz.