![]()
Lawyers for a company linked to Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump are rejecting claims from D.C. restaurateur Jose Andres that Trump's statements about illegal immigration provided a legal basis for Andres to back out of a lease to open a restaurant at the luxury hotel Trump is building in downtown Washington.
"On their face, the Political Statements were not about the Hotel, the Restaurant, Tenant or Guarantor. They pertained to issues of federal policy with respect to illegal immigration," wrote Rebecca Woods, an attorney for the company developing the Trump Old Post Office Hotel. "Defendants have not supplied a single piece of evidence to demonstrate that the Political Statements 'destroyed' or 'injured' their right to obtain the fruits of the Sublease or compromised the 'essential purpose' of the contract."
Andres announced last July he was abandoning plans to open a Spanish restaurant at the new Trump Hotel. The chef and restaurant impresario said the venture was no longer viable because Trump's campaign-related comments "disparaging immigrants" had made it impossible for the planned restaurant to succeed, both in attracting customers and employees.
Another well-known chef, Geoffrey Zakarian, announced the next day that he was backing out of a deal to open a separate restaurant in the same Massachusetts Avenue Hotel.
Trump responded by suing the Andres-linked firms as well as the Zakarian-related companies involved.
In the new legal filing submitted Friday in D.C. Superior Court, Trump's team says allowing the Andres firms to back out of a contract under these circumstances would be contrary to longstanding precedents and would undermine the sanctity of contracts. The filing called "pure speculation" the claims that Trump's comments, which included calls for deportation of illegal immigrants and a description of some Mexicans in the U.S. as "rapists," would render Andres' planned restaurant non-viable.
Trump's legal papers also say Andres' claims about why he was canceling plans for the restaurant are "suspect." The reasons for that observation were deleted from the public version of the court documents, but the filing suggests that Andres' construction planning for the restaurant was not as advanced as it was supposed to be under the lease.
In a court filing in February, Andres' lawyers said officials with the restauarant group reached out to Trump's daughter Ivanka after the initial inflammatory statements and received a conciliatory reply from a Trump executive who asked colleagues that more be done to "vet" Trump's speeches "going forward."
