Trump faces June deposition

Donald Trump faces June deposition in restaurant lawsuit

By Josh Gerstein

Expected Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump appears likely to be forced off the campaign trail in June to be deposed under oath in at least one of two lawsuits he filed after prominent chefs backed away from plans to open restaurants at the luxury Trump International Hotel under development in Washington.

A D.C. Superior Court judge approved a plan Tuesday to briefly extend court deadlines to allow Trump to give testimony June 16 in the case Trump's development company filed against a firm set up by restaurateur Geoffrey Zakarian to open a dining establishment called "The National."

The lawsuits against Zakarian's company and another created by chef Jose Andres were filed last August after the chefs said anti-immigrant remarks by Trump on the campaign trail made the planned restaurants unviable.

Zakarian's lawyers said in a court filing last week that they noticed Trump's deposition for May 10, but the GOP presidential candidate's lawyers asked to delay the testimony until June 16. Trump's attorneys said they "did not consent" to details such as the date and location of the planned deposition being made public, but the restaurateur's attorneys specified the date in the filing and indicated it was set to take place at the D.C.-based law firm representing Zakarian, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman.

The court filing did not say why Trump's lawyers objected to identifying the location of the deposition. However, Judge Brian Holeman issued an order Tuesday extending the close of discovery in the case to June 16 to accommodate the session set for that day. Depositions are not normally open to the public, but transcripts and sometimes video recordings can become public as the case progresses.

At one point, Trump's lawyers were seeking to have him and others involved in the transactions such as his daughter Ivanka Trump each do a single deposition for both the Zakarian and Andres suits. However, another judge handling the suit against Andres has put all discovery in that case on hold until June 15.

Word of Trump's planned June deposition in the D.C. restaurant dispute came as a New York court effectively postponed a big legal headache for Trump in that state: a potential civil trial over alleged fraud in his Trump University real estate program.

While the prospect of a mid-campaign legal deposition might be jarring for many candidates, Trump has already left the campaign trail at least twice to give depositions in federal class-action cases over the Trump University program.

In addition, his likely rival for the White House come November, Hillary Clinton, faces legal troubles of her own. FBI agents are expected to question her in the coming weeks in connection with an investigation into her use of a private email server as secretary of state and how information government officials say is classified came to be stored on that system. And on Monday a conservative group asked a federal judge to order Clinton to give a deposition in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking Clinton's email records.