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Tag: Mr. Trump

  • Why Trump Won’t Stop Suing the Media and Losing

    Why Trump Won’t Stop Suing the Media and Losing

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    Why would the most notoriously cash-strapped man in America waste money on frivolous lawsuits?

    On Monday, Donald Trump—whose lawyers recently announced that he can’t come up with the money to post a $454 million bond in his civil fraud case—fired off yet another suit against a news organization that reported facts he didn’t like. The targets this time are ABC News and its anchor George Stephanopoulos, who Trump alleges defamed him by stating that Trump had been found liable for raping E. Jean Carroll.

    The case looks like a sure loser. Trump was technically found liable under New York law for sexual abuse, not for rape, but the judge in the civil case ruled that, by forcibly penetrating Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, “Mr. Trump in fact did ‘rape’ Ms. Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood.” But no matter. The Stephanopoulos suit slots into a well-worn groove for Trump, who for years has lodged periodic lawsuits against alleged purveyors of “fake news” about him. Targets have included The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, Bob Woodward, and a Wisconsin TV station that ran an attack ad against him during the 2020 campaign. Trump has even gone after the board of the Pulitzer Prizes for awarding Pulitzers to the Post and the Times for their coverage of his connections to Russia.

    Filing these suits has been costly for Trump—or rather, for donors to his campaign and affiliated political action committees, who have footed millions of dollars in legal fees. Not one of Trump’s media lawsuits has ever succeeded, nor is one ever likely to, given both the underlying facts and the towering bar a president or former president faces in proving defamation. In one case against The New York Times, a judge found Trump’s argument so flimsy that he ordered Trump to pay the Times’ legal fees. In other cases, such as the one involving the Wisconsin station, the suit was quietly withdrawn a few months after it was filed.

    David A. Graham: Trump’s money problems are very real and very bad

    So why does he keep doing it? On a basic level, this appears to be just Trump being Trump—peevish, headstrong, and narcissistic. For decades, his love-hate relationship with reporters has tended to flare into legal action, as it did in 2006 when he sued the writer Tim O’Brien over a few pages in a book that questioned Trump’s personal wealth. As Trump told me in an interview in 2016, he knew he couldn’t win that suit (he didn’t) but brought it anyway to score a few points. “I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and [O’Brien’s publisher] spent a whole lot more,” he said then. “I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.”

    But Trump’s quixotic legal crusades are not as irrational as they appear. Suing the press serves as a branding exercise and a fundraising tool. The lawsuits show his supporters that Trump is taking the fight to those lying journalists—so won’t you contribute a few dollars to the cause? They thus have become an end unto themselves, part of an infinite loop: sue, publicize the suit, solicit and collect donations, sue again. The cases may be weak on the legal merits, but they “further his narrative of being persecuted by the radical left media,” Brett Kappel, a campaign-finance lawyer who has researched Trump’s legal actions against the press, told me.

    This narrative has been a fixture of Trump’s fundraising pitches for years. A few weeks after his inauguration, in 2017, one of his fundraising committees sent out an email urging donors “to do your part to fight back against the media’s attacks and deceptions” by sending contributions that would help “cut through the noise” of news reports. Even before Trump filed a lawsuit against CNN in August 2022 (for describing his election lies as “the Big Lie”), his campaign was using the nonexistent suit to drum up contributions. “I’m calling on my best and most dedicated supporters to add their names to stand with me in my impending LAWSUIT against Fake News CNN,” read a fundraising email. A second email sent out under Trump’s name a few hours later struck a sterner tone: “I’m going to look over the names of the first 45 Patriots who added their names to publicly stand with their President AGAINST CNN.”

    When Trump got around to filing the suit two months later, the appeals began anew. “I am SUING the Corrupt News Network (CNN) for DEFAMING and SLANDERING my name,” the campaign email read, in a chaotic typographical style reminiscent of a ransom note. “They’ve called me a LIAR, and so far, I’ve been proven RIGHT about EVERYTHING. Remember, when they come after ME, they are really coming after YOU … I’m calling on YOU to rush in a donation of ANY AMOUNT RIGHT NOW to make a statement that you PROUDLY stand with me.” The suit was dismissed last year by a federal judge appointed by Trump. Trump is appealing.

    Of course, the cost of suing news organizations is a pittance compared with what Trump’s donors are spending on his criminal defense. But it isn’t cheap. According to Federal Election Commission records culled by Kappel, the Trump-controlled Save America PAC shelled out nearly $500,000 to the firm that sued the Pulitzer Prize board on Trump’s behalf in 2022. It paid $211,000 last year to another law firm that handled Trump’s litigation against CNN, among other matters, and an additional $203,000 to the firm handling the appeal.

    The biggest recipient, by far, has been the attorney Charles Harder, the defamation specialist who represented Hulk Hogan in his successful suit against Gawker Media in 2016. From early 2018 to May 2021, according to FEC records, Harder took $4.4 million in fees from Trump-affiliated organizations. At one point in 2020, Harder’s Beverly Hills firm received more money than any other firm doing work for Trump.

    From the January/February 2024 issue: Is journalism ready?

    Harder’s work on Trump’s behalf didn’t produce anything close to his career-making Hogan verdict, which resulted in a $140 million award that drove Gawker into bankruptcy. Harder took the lead in Trump’s effort to suppress publication of Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury in 2018; he sent cease-and-desist letters to Wolff and his publisher, Henry Holt and Co., before the book’s release, claiming that it contained libelous passages. The book was released as scheduled and became a best seller, and Trump didn’t sue. In 2020, Harder handled Trump’s lawsuit against the Times, alleging that an opinion piece by the former Times editor Max Frankel was defamatory. A judge dismissed that suit in 2021. (Harder, who no longer represents Trump, declined to comment for this story.)

    Whether Trump’s beat-the-press strategy is a net financial winner, once all the donations are collected and the attorney fees are subtracted, is hard to say. But Trump’s filing of another hopeless lawsuit this week suggests that the math may be in his favor. Why bother paying lawyers millions of dollars to sue and appeal if the return on investment is less than zero? Trump may be petty and irrational, but he has never been accused of neglecting his own financial interests. (A Trump spokesperson didn’t return a request for comment.)

    At the moment, of course, Trump has much bigger headaches. As of this writing, he’s days away from having his assets seized to satisfy that civil-fraud judgment. His overall fundraising has lagged President Joe Biden’s. And he is burning through his supporters’ money to pay for his criminal defense. Despite all that, he still finds a way to keep filing lawsuits against the media. You almost have to admire the commitment.

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    Paul Farhi

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  • The Impossible Task of Muzzling Donald Trump

    The Impossible Task of Muzzling Donald Trump

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    When Donald Trump appeared last week in a Washington, D.C., courtroom for his arraignment on federal election charges, the presiding judge gave the former president a few simple instructions for staying out of jail while he awaited trial.

    Trump could not talk to potential witnesses about the case except through lawyers, Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya told him, and he could not commit a crime on the local, state, or federal level. Both are standard directives to defendants. But then Upadhyaya added a warning that seemed tailored a bit more specifically to the blustery politician standing before her: “I want to remind you,” the judge said, “it is a crime to intimidate a witness or retaliate against anyone for providing information about your case to the prosecution, or otherwise obstruct justice.”

    When Upadhyaya asked Trump if he understood, he nodded. Fewer than 24 hours later, Trump appeared to flout that very warning—in its spirit if not its letter—by threatening his would-be foes in an all-caps post on Truth Social: “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” Over the following week, he attacked a potential witness in the case, former Vice President Mike Pence (“delusional”); Special Counsel Jack Smith (“deranged”); and the federal judge assigned to oversee his case, Tanya Chutkan, an appointee of former President Barack Obama (Smith’s “number one draft pick,” in Trump’s words).

    Trump’s screeds highlight a challenge that will now fall to Chutkan to confront: constraining a defendant who’s both a former president and a leading candidate to take the White House—and who seems bent on making a mockery of his legal process.

    “She’s in a tight spot,” Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney in Michigan, says of Chutkan. Conceivably, the judge could find Trump in contempt of court and toss him in jail for violating the terms of his pretrial release. But even though in theory Trump should be treated like any other defendant, former prosecutors told me that he was exceedingly unlikely to go to prison over his pretrial statements. And Trump probably knows it. (Whether Trump will go to prison if he is convicted is another hotly debated matter.)

    Read: The humiliation of Donald Trump

    “I’m sure she would be very reluctant to do that, in light of the fact that he’s running for president,” McQuade told me. “So I think as a result, he has a very long leash, and I think he will simply dare her to revoke [his freedom] by saying the most outrageous things he can.”

    At a pretrial hearing today, Chutkan issued her first warnings to Trump’s lawyers about their client, according to reporting by Steven Portnoy of ABC News and Kyle Cheney of Politico. “Mr. Trump, like every American, has a First Amendment right to free speech,” she said. “But that right is not absolute.” She said Trump’s presidential candidacy would not factor into her decisions, and she rebuffed suggestions by a Trump lawyer, John Lauro, that the former president had a right to respond to his political opponents in the heat of a campaign. “He’s a criminal defendant,” she reminded him. “He’s going to have restrictions like every single other defendant.”

    Chutkan said she would be scrutinizing Trump’s words carefully, and she concluded with what she called “a general word of caution”: “Even arguably ambiguous statements from parties or their counsel,” the judge said, “can threaten the process.” She added: “I will take whatever measures are necessary to safeguard the integrity of these proceedings.”

    Chutkan had called the hearing to determine whether to bar Trump and his lawyers from publicly disclosing evidence provided to them by prosecutors—a standard part of the pretrial process. The evidence includes millions of pages of documents and transcribed witness interviews from a year-long investigation, and the government argued that Trump or his lawyers could undermine the process by making them public before the trial. Despite her warnings to Trump’s team, she sided with the defense’s request to narrow the restrictions on what they could disclose, and she did not add other constraints on what he could say about the case.

    Yet the effect of Chutkan’s courtroom comments was to put Trump on notice. If he continues to flout judicial warnings, she could place a more formal gag order on him, the ex-prosecutors said. And if he ignores that directive, she would likely issue additional warnings before considering a criminal-contempt citation. A further escalation, McQuade said, would be to hold a hearing and order Trump to show cause for why he should not be held in contempt. “Maybe she gives him a warning, and she gives him another chance and another chance, but eventually, her biggest hammer” is to send him to jail.

    Judges have sanctioned high-profile defendants in other cases recently. In 2019, the Trump ally Roger Stone was barred from posting on major social-media platforms after Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that he had violated a gag order she had issued. (Stone did honor this directive.) The Trump foe Michael Avenatti, who represented Stormy Daniels in her case against Trump and briefly considered challenging him for the presidency, was jailed shortly before his trial on extortion charges after prosecutors accused him of disregarding financial terms of his bail. “He was just scooped up and thrown into solitary,” one of his former lawyers, E. Danya Perry, told me. She said that Avenatti was thrown into the same jail cell that had held El Chapo, the Mexican drug lord. (Avenatti later claimed that his treatment was payback ordered by then–Attorney General Bill Barr; the prison warden said he was placed in solitary confinement because of “serious concerns” about his safety, and Barr has called Avenatti’s accusation “ridiculous.”)

    Neither Stone nor Avenatti, however, is as high-profile as Trump, arguably the most famous federal defendant in American history. And Perry doubts that Chutkan would imprison him before a trial. Trump has ignored warnings from judges overseeing the various civil cases brought against him over the years and has never faced tangible consequences. “He has done it so many times and he has managed to skate so many times that he certainly is emboldened,” Perry said.

    Indeed, Trump has also suggested he would ignore a gag order from Chutkan. “I will talk about it. I will. They’re not taking away my First Amendment rights,” Trump told a campaign rally in New Hampshire on Wednesday.

    Trump’s political motives for vilifying his prosecutors and once again portraying himself as the victim of a witch hunt are obvious: He’s trying to rile up his Republican base. Trump also seems to be executing something of a legal strategy in his public statements about the trial. He’s called Washington, D.C., “a filthy and crime-ridden embarrassment,” possibly reasoning that these remarks will force the court to agree to his request to shift the trial to a venue with a friendlier population of potential jurors, such as West Virginia.

    David A. Graham: Trump is acting like he’s cornered

    That’s less likely to work, according to the former prosecutors I interviewed. “I’d be shocked to see that be successful,” Noah Bookbinder, a former federal prosecutor who heads the anti-corruption advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told me. “It’s sort of like the old joke about the child who kills his mother and father and then asks for mercy because he’s an orphan. I just don’t see a court going for that.”

    Trump’s attacks also present a problem for Smith, the special counsel. On one hand, prosecutors have a clear interest in ensuring that their witnesses do not feel intimidated; on the other, Smith could feel that trying to silence Trump would play into the former president’s victim narrative. Justice Department prosecutors alerted Chutkan to Trump’s “I’m coming after you” post in a court filing, and during today’s hearing they voiced concerns that if not restricted, Trump could disclose evidence to benefit his campaign. (A Trump spokesperson said the former president’s warning was “the definition of political speech,” and that it referred to “special interest groups and Super PACs” opposing his candidacy.) But Smith’s team did not ask Chutkan to fully gag Trump or even admonish him. “You see the prosecutors being very, very restrained,” Bookbinder said. “With a lot of defendants who were bad-mouthing the prosecutor and witnesses, they would have immediately gone in and asked for an order for the defendant to stop doing that.”

    Bookbinder described the citation of Trump’s post as “a brushback pitch” by the government, a signal that they are watching the former president’s public statements closely. But like Chutkan, Smith might be reluctant to push the matter very far. Fighting with Trump over a gag order could distract from where the government wants to focus the case—on Trump’s alleged crimes—and it could indulge his desire to drag out the trial, Bookbinder noted. But the special counsel has to weigh those concerns against the possibility that an out-of-control defendant could jeopardize the safety of prosecutors and witnesses. “My strong suspicion is that Jack Smith doesn’t want to go there,” Bookbinder said. “I think at some point he may have little choice.”

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    Russell Berman

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