Donald Trump and Chef Geoffrey Zakarian (Photos: John Moore/Getty Images, Noel Vasquez/Getty Images)

Already fighting lawsuits against his defunct “university,” Donald Trump is facing a grilling Thursday in another case — one against celebrity chef Geoffrey Zakarian in which the candidate’s insulting remarks about Mexican immigrants will be a central issue.

A Washington, D.C., judge has ordered Trump to be deposed — over the strenuous objections of Trump’s lawyers — in a lawsuit brought by Trump last year against Zakarian after the chef pulled out of a deal to open a restaurant in the Trump International Hotel, Washington, D.C. Zakarian and another celebrity chef, José Andrés, withdrew from separate deals, claiming that Trump’s disparaging comments about Mexicans would hurt their own reputations and business brands.

Rebecca Woods, Trump’s lead lawyer in the case, did not respond to questions from Yahoo News Wednesday about whether she would file a last-minute motion seeking to block the deposition, which has been ordered for Thursday at 10 a.m. ET at the downtown Washington offices of Zakarian’s law firm, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. If it takes place as scheduled, it would be the latest example of how Trump’s multiple ongoing lawsuits — as both plaintiff and defendant — are intruding on his campaign for the presidency.

Since declaring his candidacy last June, Trump has already been secretly deposed twice in a lawsuit accusing him of fraud in his operations of Trump University. His lawyers in that case in San Diego are currently seeking to block the release of videotaped excerpts from those depositions. The motion is before U.S. Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who Trump has accused of bias against him because of the judge’s Mexican ancestry. (Curiel was born in the United States.)

Trump’s lawyers in the Zakarian dispute have also sought to block his deposition in that case, arguing in a motion that it is unnecessary because his son Donald Trump Jr. and daughter Ivanka Trump have handled most of the dealings relating to the Trump International Hotel. They also say that it would be an “inconvenient” and “burdensome” intrusion on the schedule of the presumptive Republican nominee.

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But the judge in the case, Brian F. Holeman, rejected those arguments, ruling that Trump has “personal knowledge of events and information” relating to the case and noting pointedly that it was Trump — not Zakarian — who initiated the litigation. Moreover, he wrote in his ruling, there are no exceptions under court rules for “individuals that ‘may have a busy schedule’ as a result of seeking public office.” (Trump’s public schedule shows nothing for Thursday morning, but he is scheduled to be at a rally in Dallas that evening.)

Based on previous filings by Zakarian’s lawyers, the deposition appears to be likely to focus on the controversial comments about Mexican immigrants that Trump made in announcing his campaign on June 16, 2015. Trump said: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best …They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with [them]. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

Those comments caused Zakarian and Andrés to pull out of their contracts with Trump, prompting the real estate tycoon to sue them in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia for breach of contract. But Zakarian’s lawyers argue that Trump’s “inflammatory” comments were deal breakers. The two chefs signed their contracts with Trump because of his brand name and public reputation, the lawyers argued, and Trump’s own remarks undercut that name and reputation, making it impossible to do business with him.

“This lawsuit involves CZ-National’s [Zakarian’s company] contentions that it never bargained for — and certainly never imagined — that Mr. Trump would frustrate completely its legitimate expectations regarding the prospects of opening and operating The National restaurant in the new Trump International Hotel,” the lawyers stated in one motion last February. Trump needs to be deposed, they wrote, because “only Mr. Trump is able to explain what he meant by those statements and whether he considered the impact of those statements on CZ-National and its ability to … open and [operate] a restaurant in the new hotel.”

The deposition is only one front in Trump’s multiple legal wars this week. In a separate suit involving Andrés, Trump’s lawyers argued that the candidate had merely made “political statements about federal immigration” unrelated to the restaurant business and such statements are insufficient grounds for the chef to pull out of his contract. Besides, Woods told Washington, D.C., Judge Jennifer Di Toro, Trump has since “qualified his statements” about Mexican immigrants. “He has said many nice things about Hispanics,” she said.

But Andrés’ lawyer, Brigida Benitez, argued that Trump’s statements had directly affected the ability of her client, a native of Spain, to profitably operate a restaurant at Trump’s hotel. The planned restaurant, she said, would be run by a Spanish owner, serve Spanish food and employ Hispanic workers in the kitchen. And Trump’s comments were not about “federal immigration policy,” she said, they were about “Hispanic immigrants,” thereby directly cutting into the restaurant’s “customer base.”

Di Toro said she would rule in the next two weeks on whether to permit the case to go forward.