Watch A Former Trump U. Employee Get Increasingly Uncomfortable As CNN Reads From Court Documents

From the July 13 edition of CNN's Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield

JAMES HARRIS: We were bringing in the money.

DREW GRIFFIN: A lot of it.

HARRIS: A lot of money.

GRIFFIN: Were you -- you said you were the top guy. Were you the top guy?

HARRIS: I don’t know if I was. I just know I’m really good at what I do.

GRIFFIN: You’ve said you were the top guy.

HARRIS: OK, so maybe I was the top guy. I don’t really know if I was or not, I just know that my numbers were one of the -- from week to week to week, my numbers were in the top one or two.

GRIFFIN (voice over): James Harris’s job was to get people to believe they, too, could be as successful at real estate as Donald Trump, and to reel them in, sign them up, get them to pay as much as $34,000 on the promise that the next seminar, the next class would teach them all they would need to know.

GRIFFIN: What do you know about real estate?

HARRIS: Real estate is a very wide, huge business. I got involved in real estate personally, myself, in the 90s.

GRIFFIN (voice over): And if you attended a James Harris Trump University seminar, you would hear a lot more about Harris’s claims of success and experience in real estate. Claims made in this verbatim transcript of a Trump seminar he gave in San Bernardino, California.

GRIFFIN: Do you remember when you said this: ‘I’m a former licensed agent broker. At 29, I became the top 1 percent broker in the country. I build homes in Atlanta, Georgia, and I used to live in Beverly Hills.’?

HARRIS: Yes. If I said those things, they are true. I did live in Beverly Hills, and I did --

GRIFFIN: We have no record of you ever living in Beverly Hills.

HARRIS: OK.

GRIFFIN: We can’t find your broker’s license anywhere.

HARRIS: OK.

GRIFFIN: And I have no idea what homes you built in Atlanta, Georgia. Did you build homes in Georgia?

HARRIS: I’m not prepared to answer those questions today.

GRIFFIN: This is part of your pitch. Is any of that true?

HARRIS: Again, I’m not going to answer those questions because I haven’t seen that.

GRIFFIN: Well, you certainly know what you’ve done in your life.

HARRIS: I don’t know if I -- I don’t know where that’s coming from. I don’t know where you got that from.

GRIFFIN: This is a transcript submitted in court.

HARRIS: I’ve never seen that --

GRIFFIN: Of the taped --

HARRIS: I don’t know if that’s a court doc --

GRIFFIN: Presentation that you gave in San Bernardino.   

HARRIS: I’ve never seen it.

GRIFFIN: It’s a court document.

[...]

GRIFFIN: Here’s an email you wrote. ‘I just spoke to Austin and Irene, the older retired couple who had to pull the $30,000 balance for the gold, and she said it’s done and should be in Monday. So that will be another $35K… We will easily have another $100K hit by Friday. Yahoo.’  Your associate, Ryan, responds, ‘We’ve always been a dangerous team, brotherman. These peeps don’t have a chance against us. Smiley face.'

HARRIS: That’s called sales.

GRIFFIN: Isn’t that called ripping off an old couple?  

HARRIS: Absolutely not.

Previously:

CNN's Baldwin: Why Should People Believe Trump’s Campaign Promises If He Couldn’t Keep Trump U. Promises?

CNN Shows Students’ Side Of Trump University Fraud Allegations

Fact-Checkers Flunk Trump's Defenses Of Trump U.