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Getty Trump fights racketeering claim in Trump University suit

Lawyers for Donald Trump are fighting claims that his Trump University real estate seminar program amounted to a racketeering operation under federal law.

In a court filing Friday night, Trump's attorneys reject allegations in a federal class-action lawsuit that Trump University violated the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and that Trump was directly involved in those violations.

"This case was an overreach from inception. It stretches civil RICO beyond the breaking point and would effectively federalize consumer advertising fraud claims, and subject officers, directors, and employees of every Fortune 500 company to unwarranted personal liability," Trump lawyers Daniel Petrocelli and David Kirman wrote. "Not a single case plaintiff cites comes close to approving of civil RICO claims on the garden-variety consumer claims here."

Trump is asking U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel to toss out the lawsuit, which is one of two pending class actions. The request comes as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has begun to emerge from a media firestorm he caused by publicly accusing Curiel of bias and attributing that bias to the judge's Latino heritage. Numerous Democratic leaders and several prominent GOP figures blasted Trump's remarks as racist.

Curiel has not publicly responded to Trump's racial remarks, but tersely noted in a ruling last month that the presidential nominee "has placed the integrity of these proceedings at issue."

Trump's legal team appears to face an uphill battle in trying to get the suit thrown out, since the judge issued a ruling in 2014 that the RICO claim could proceed as a class action and has rejected a similar summary judgment motion in the parallel lawsuit.

Attorneys pressing the suits against Trump on behalf of former Trump University students say the program fraudulently advertised that instructors were hand-picked by Trump and that students would learn the real estate mogul's "secrets." Even calling the program a "university" was a fraud, the lawsuits contend.

Trump's lawyers say claims that students would be told Trump's "secrets" or that he was personally involved in selecting teachers were, at worst, marketing "puffery" not intended to be taken literally.

"Plaintiff cannot dispute that students had vastly different interpretations of the terms 'secrets,' 'hand-picked,' and 'university,'" Petrocelli and Kirman wrote, calling the marketing language "vague and highly subjective claims, and not the type of detailed factual assertion necessary to prove fraud."

Trump's lawyers also say there's no evidence that Trump himself was involved in crafting the statements now said to be fraudulent.

Invoking the federal RICO statute creates the possibility that former Trump University students, many of whom paid about $1,500 for a three-day seminar and some of whom paid nearly $35,000 for a mentorship program, could receive triple damages and the class-action lawyers pursuing the case could recover their attorneys' fees.

While the law passed in 1970 was initially focused on businesses run by the Mafia, it has since been used to go after a wide variety of enterprises, including ordinary corporations allegedly engaged in fraud, as well as activists like anti-abortion campaigners accused of illegally obstructing clinics.

Curiel is scheduled to hear arguments on the summary judgment motion in San Diego on July 22, one day after the end of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland where Trump is expected to receive the Republican presidential nomination.

The judge has set a trial for Nov. 28 in the parallel class-action suit pressing claims that Trump University violated state anti-fraud laws in California, Florida and New York.

In the meantime, Curiel is fielding requests from media organizations to clear the way for the public release of videos of Trump's depositions in the pair of lawsuits. Trump's lawyers are fighting to keep the videos under wraps. A hearing on that issue is set for June 30, but lawyers on all sides have asked that it be held next week.