Donald Trump's University: Attorney Rejects Allegations in a Federal Class-action Lawsuit

Lawyers for Donald Trump are on defensive, and they fight claims that Trump University real estate seminar program amounted to a racketeering operation under federal law.

Donald Trumps lawyers are going against racketeering operation allegations under the federal law involving his Trump University real estate seminar program, Politico reported.

Trump's lawyers dismissed the allegations that Trump University violated the Racketeering Influenced and Corruption Organizations Act and that Trump was knowingly involved in the violations, based from the federal class-action lawsuit that was filed in court last Friday night.

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

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

Trump's legal advisers appears to face a struggling battle in trying to get the suit dismissed, 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.

Meanwhile, Trump filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit against the celebrity chef, Geoffrey Zakarian, LA Times reported. The chef withdrew to open a restaurant in Washington's Old Post Office Building, where a luxury hotel is being renovated by Trump.
According to the source, Zakarian pulled out of deal after Trump made a "bigoted" remarks towards Mexican.