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Cheryl Mills was not mentioned by name but it was clear who Donald Trump's lawyers were referring to. | Getty Trump lawyers point to Clinton aide in Trump U. video fight

The Clinton email controversy and the litigation over Trump University may not yet have merged into a single, unified scandal as some predicted a few weeks back, but the process of cross-pollination has undoubtedly begun.

Lawyers for Donald Trump on Monday invoked the example of Hillary Clinton aide Cheryl Mills as they fought to keep the public from seeing videos of the real estate mogul's depositions in class-action lawsuits over the Trump University seminar program.

In a court filing with U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee's attorneys noted that Mills recently won an order from another judge to keep under wraps videos of her deposition in a Clinton-email-related Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

"Recently, a district court in Washington, D.C. protected video depositions from disclosure under similar circumstances in a case involving Hillary Clinton," Trump attorney Dan Petrocelli and colleagues wrote in a pleading that did not mention the former Clinton chief of staff by name but unmistakably cited the order about her.

"In that case, as here, the deponent feared release of her deposition video would allow others to 'manipulate [her] testimony, and invade her personal privacy, to advance a partisan agenda that should have nothing to do with this litigation,'" Trump's legal team wrote. "As here, the deponent did not oppose release of her transcript, but only the video. That court granted the motion to seal the video of her deposition. Since the transcripts were available, it was 'unnecessary to also make the audiovisual recording of [the] deposition public. ...' The same reasoning and result apply here."

Lawyers pressing class-action fraud and racketeering lawsuits against Trump and the now-dormant educational venture have tried twice to file in the San Diego federal court's public record 48 video clips from a pair of depositions the GOP presidential hopeful sat through in December and January. Curiel rejected the first filing attempt and is still mulling the second.

Citing intense public interest in the cases, a coalition of news media organizations is also urging the judge to make the videos public.

While there are similarities to the situation involving Mills' deposition, there are also differences. Mills is not a party to the FOIA lawsuit where she was ordered to testify. She testified as a third-party witness, while Trump is a defendant in both of the federal lawsuits over Trump University.

Mills was also testifying as the FBI conducts a criminal investigation of Clinton's email server set-up. No similar probe is known to be underway into Trump University, although it was looked at by attorneys general in Florida and Texas and is the focus of a legal action by the New York attorney general.

In the new filing Monday, Trump's lawyers are more explicit than they have been before that some are sure to use the videos of the real estate developer and reality TV host to make political mischief.

"Once released, the videos can and will be broadcast by 'less-reputable outlets' and for less reputable reasons," Trump's attorneys wrote. "The near-certainty that the video depositions would be used for political purposes — having nothing to do with the merits of this litigation only underscores the Court’s duty to prevent misuse of these judicial proceedings by prohibiting public release of the videos. ... Video depositions were not intended for broadcast media or to be used to further a political agenda. This Court cannot allow judicial tools to be hijacked for these purposes."

Curiel has set a July 13 hearing on the video access issue.