The Prosecutor Who Helped Nail Trump University Has a Few Pointers for Jack Smith and Fani Willis

Donald Trump has spent most of his adult life successfully dodging major legal consequences. The largest monetary exception (until last Friday) came in 2018. To settle three fraud cases against him, the then president agreed to pay $25 million to students who said they had been duped by his Trump University, which Trump claimed had employed his own “handpicked” instructors to impart valuable business insights. (Trump, in the settlement, did not admit wrongdoing.)

An assistant state attorney general, Tristan Snell, spearheaded New York’s five-year effort to hold Trump accountable. Snell has now put to paper the lessons he learned from that experience in his forthcoming book, Taking Down Trump—a guide that’s practical, entertaining, and perfectly timed as the former president and current 2024 GOP front-runner defends himself in multiple jurisdictions, with enormous stakes for the judicial system itself. “We are not necessarily doomed if these cases fail,” Snell tells me, in an interview edited for length and clarity. “But we are going to be damaged, deeply.”

Vanity Fair: Reading your book, I couldn’t decide whether it’s comic or tragic that we have someone so powerful who is so frequently accused of breaking laws that a guide to prosecuting him is relevant.

Tristan Snell: That’s a very good point—I have written a book that the world shouldn’t need. We shouldn’t need a guide on how, in a desperation rearguard maneuver, to save democracy and the rule of law at the last minute.

And yet here we are. Your road to becoming an expert in prosecuting Trump began fairly routinely, when you were handed a pile of documents almost exactly 13 years ago, in February 2011. What were you expecting at that point?

I didn’t have any sort of special thoughts about Trump. He was not somebody I spent a lot of time thinking about. I just found, and still find, consumer protection to be a really compelling area of the law. I was there to go after rip-offs and scams and con artists and fraud and deceptive business practices. And it turns out that that actually is a good description of a lot of his work. I started talking to the victims of Trump University, and these poor people—they were his superfans and he hurt them the most. He cleaned them out, he took their life savings.

You had prosecuted other scams—you weren’t naive. Did the cravenness of the Trump University tactics still surprise you?

Students were told to call their credit card companies to get credit-limit increases, supposedly as an exercise to boost their assertiveness in deal-making. But really it was to make sure that the students would have more credit with which to purchase the more expensive “Elite” programs. It’s so slimy. It definitely surprised me at the time. And it just goes to show that there is no bottom with him.

You write that even as you were hunting for evidence and warding off Trump’s attacks on the investigation, you were also encountering internal obstacles to pursuing the probe, including what you saw as hesitation by your boss, Eric Schneiderman, then the New York state attorney general.

Schneiderman was more interested in becoming powerful than in using his power for good. He wanted to be a mover and shaker rather than disrupt the movers and shakers. But credit where credit’s due: Schneiderman did ultimately pull the trigger on that case, where I think nine prosecutors out of 10 probably would have said, “Screw it, I’m not touching it.”

In your view Schneiderman’s decision to go forward was motivated by more than the facts: that the attorney general eventually saw the potential political benefits and that he was angry at Trump for having dismissed an early, smaller settlement offer. Doesn’t that somewhat vindicate Trump, who has always claimed he was selectively prosecuted?

No. Trump University had made our list of targets because we had received complaints from consumers. We were not inventing a vendetta against Donald Trump or targeting Donald Trump. He had already been sued in a class action. It had everything to do with trying to clean up an industry that has been shown to be full of fraud. I guess, technically speaking, every decision to litigate is a selection, but I don’t think that it had to do with Trump personally. We spent many months assembling every brick and support bar we could build into the foundation of the case. I think that was really the key. The fact Schneiderman might have reached that decision in anger—I don’t think that makes it any less valid.