Donald Trump is asking the judge whom he has spent months bashing to do him a favor.
U.S. District Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel, whom Trump has publicly denounced as a "hater," will decide whether to release videos of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee's testifying in a lawsuit against Trump University.
Lawyers for Trump filed a motion this week in U.S. District Court in San Diego seeking to prevent the videos — from Trump's deposition late last year and early this year in a class-action lawsuit accusing him of fraud — from entering the public court record.
Trump's lawyers said there's "no legitimate reason" for the plaintiffs to even submit the videos in the case, one of two brought by former students who say they paid tens of thousands of dollars for investment courses they found to be worthless.
Related: Court Documents Reveal How Trump University Staffers Sold the Brand
Transcripts of the deposition are already available, his lawyers said, arguing that the only motive to submit the videos is to create "prejudice" against Trump.
To which lawyers for the plaintiffs responded Tuesday, in effect: Of course it is — that's the point.
"This is precisely the type of 'prejudice' our adversarial system demands," the ex-students' lawyers said, adding that Trump "may think anything that does not go his way is unfair, but that is clearly not the legal definition of unfair prejudice."
They argue the video would let the judge see for himself that Trump wasn't rushed into giving answers or shouted down and that visibly "unhappy about the admissions he had no choice but to make."
"These are all matters that a paper transcript cannot reflect," they said.
Neither side mentions Trump's presidential campaign, but if the videos were to become public, they would almost certainly make their way into opposition ads.
And the decision on whether that could happen rests with same judge whom Trump called "a hater of Donald Trump, a hater," at a rally late last month in San Diego.
Curiel "happens to be, we believe, Mexican," Trump said, and as a result he's "a very hostile judge."
Curiel was born in Indiana.
Related: Trump University Case: Who Is Federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel?
Still, Trump said in February on NBC's "Meet the Press" that Curiel was biased against him because he's called for building a wall along the Mexican border to keep out immigrants.
"Because of everything that's going on with Mexico ... this is a judge who I believe has treated me very, very unfairly," Trump said then.
Trump has called on Curiel to recuse himself from the case — based on his ancestry — which the judge has declined to do.
