[Hoot Gibson]

Trump made yuge political donations to campaigns of current Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and current Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and the states' investigations into Trump University magically disappeared.

It is really a shame that Republicans passed up a chance to nominate a scandal-free candidate as its presidential candidate.

Instead, we can look forward to five more months of Hillary and The Donald debating about which one is more corrupt. There should have been no such debate. This campaign should have been all about Hillary defending her criminal actions against daily charges of corruption. Now, we have a daily squabble between two thoroughly corrupt candidates.

Former Texas official says he was told to drop Trump University probe

WASHINGTON -- Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton moved to muzzle a former state regulator who says he was ordered in 2010 to drop a fraud investigation into Trump University for political reasons.

Paxton's office issued a cease and desist letter to former Deputy Chief of Consumer Protection John Owens after he made public copies of a 14-page internal summary of the state's case against Donald Trump for scamming millions from students of his now-defunct real estate seminar.

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Owens, now retired, said his team had built a solid case against the now-presumptive Republican presidential nominee, but was told to drop it after Trump's company agreed to cease operations in Texas.

The former state regulator told The Associated Press on Friday that decision was highly unusual and left the bilked students on their own to attempt to recover their tuition money from the celebrity businessman.

Trump University is the target of two lawsuits in San Diego and one in New York that accuse the business of fleecing students with unfulfilled promises to teach secrets of success in real estate.

A federal judge overseeing one of the class action suits unsealed documents in the case earlier this week, then ordered some of those records to be withdrawn from public view, saying they had "mistakenly" been released.

Trump has personally attacked U.S. District Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel as "a hater of Donald Trump," claiming he is biased against Trump because of his Hispanic heritage.

"We're in front of a very hostile judge," Trump told a crowd in San Diego on May 27. "The judge was appointed by Barack Obama, federal judge. Frankly, he should recuse himself because he's given us ruling after ruling after ruling, negative, negative, negative."

"What happens is the judge, who happens to be -- we believe -- Mexican. Which is great. I think that's fine," he said. "You know what? I think the Mexicans are going to end up loving Donald Trump when I give all these jobs, OK?"

Curiel was born in East Chicago, Indiana. Curiel's parents, however, are Mexican, according to a 2002 New York Times report of the judge's work in the Southern District of California's narcotics enforcement division.

Despite the lawsuits, the presumptive GOP nominee said Thursday he plans to reopen Trump University once the legal cases are resolved.

As CBS News reported in September, Trump University closed not because of litigation, but because students were not signing up for its Gold elite mentoring program that cost $35,000. The university, as a result, could no longer afford to fulfill its commitments to the students who had already paid.

A June 2010 memo from Trump University said the program was facing "significant operations risk" and it closed a month later. A former employee told CBS News that the program was "run into the ground."

According to the documents provided by Owens, his team sought to sue Trump, his company and several business associates to help recover more than $2.6 million students spent on seminars and materials, plus another $2.8 million in penalties and fees.

Owens said he was so surprised at the order to stand down he made a copy of the case file and took it home.

"It had to be political in my mind because Donald Trump was treated differently than any other similarly situated scam artist in the 16 years I was at the consumer protection office," said Owens, who lives in Houston.

Owens' boss at the time was then-Attorney General Greg Abbott, who is now the state's GOP governor.

The Associated Press first reported Thursday that Trump gave donations totaling $35,000 to Abbott's gubernatorial campaign three years after his office closed the Trump U case. Several Texas media outlets then reported Owens' accusation that the probe was dropped for political reasons.

8,491 pages raise more flags about Bondi's Trump money

Last week, the state of New York unveiled its case against Donald Trump.

Among the testimony was this quote: "I believe that Trump University was a fraudulent scheme and that it preyed upon the elderly."

The statement was particularly damning — since it came from one of Trump University's sales managers.

New York's attorney general says the evidence is compelling that Trump's get-rich seminars — promoted in both Florida and New York — were merely a "bait and switch scheme" where people paid thousands of dollars for promised training and insight they never received.

Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, however, decided not to act on similar complaints filed by Floridians.

She, however, did take money from Trump — while her office said it was "reviewing" the complaints against him. Three days after the Orlando Sentinel wrote a story in 2013 about Floridians who felt scammed by a Trump affiliate, Trump's charitable foundation gave $25,000 to one of Bondi's campaign committees.

It was wildly unethical for her to accept this money. No self-respecting prosecutor would take money from a potential target.

Bondi's office always claimed there wasn't enough evidence to make a case. But I wondered how hard her staff worked to actually find any.

So I asked to see her office's investigative reports for myself.

Her office took about four weeks to respond and then finally did so with a massive document dump — thousands of pages, many of which were exchanges with the press about why they weren't investigating now and stressing they never had. A copy of an email I sent back in 2013 was included 39 different times.

All told, they provided 8,491 pages of records.

Perhaps they thought no one would really look at them.

If so, they were wrong.

I did — and found lots of troubling things and inconsistencies.

For instance, Bondi's office originally claimed it had received "no complaints" about the Trump University (Page 3,229) since she took office.

Later, a staffer said: "Under this administration, we have received one complaint regarding Donald Trump, Trump University or Trump Entrepreneur Institute (page 4,268).

Later still, a staffer said two (page 5,142).

Yet another wrote: "Just so everyone is aware, we have 100 complaints about The Trump Group." (Page 1,733), though that August 2013 message didn't cite a timeframe..

It goes on like that for hundreds of pages.

Most importantly, though, let me tell you what I did not find among those 8,491 pages — much evidence that Bondi's investigators had actually probed or investigated the complaints that had come her way.

There were lots of letters from Bondi's staff — and from the staff of the previous administration, under Bill McCollum, which fielded even more Trump-related complaints — telling people who felt like they were ripped off that they should hire their own attorney or complain to another government agency.

In one case, a man said Trump University cost him $26,000 and drove him into bankruptcy. He asked if Bondi would follow the New York attorney general's lead in investigating the matter. Bondi's office instead suggested he "visit an Internet search engine such as http://www.yahoo.com or http://www.google.com to search for information on any class action lawsuits you may benefit from." (Page 5,449)

Evidence of hard-core investigative work — the likes of which New York's attorney general has conducted — appeared largely absent.

No sworn affidavits or interviews of company officials I could find. Instead, staff suggested people who felt victimized should hire their own lawyers or perhaps join the New York case.