Court Dropkicks Yet Another Garbage Trump Defamation Suit. Don’t Worry, There’s More Where That Came From.

President Trump Unveils His Infrastructure Initiative With State And Local Officials In The State Dining Room Of White House In the waning days of his presidency, Donald Trump filed defamation suits against the three news outlets he loathed above all: The New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN. In all three cases, he hired Gawker-slayer Charles Harder to avenge his honor for implying that he was only delighted to accept help from Russia to put him over the line in the 2016 election. “Russia, if you’re listening …”

All these cases have now been dismissed, with Judge Rudolph Contreras finally booting the Post suit on Friday. That case dragged on for close to three years — not because it was better grounded in fact and law than the other two, but because it was filed in federal court in DC and wound up before then-Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, before getting bounced to Judge Florence Pan, and finally winding up in front of Judge Contreras. Justice Brown Jackson is now on the Supreme Court, of course, after a brief stint at the DC Circuit, where Judge Pan now sits. But in the meantime, the case dragged on for so long that Harder wandered off and got replaced by Harmeet Dhillon, the California lawyer who just mounted an unsuccessful challenge to Ronna Romney McDaniel for control of the RNC.

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The case was right out of the Trump litigation “playbook” of political speeches masquerading as civil litigation memorably called out by Judge Donald Middlebrooks when he benchslapped the former president and his lawyers with a million dollars in sanctions last month. For one thing it pled actual malice not by arguing that the paper knew or was reckless about the truth or falsity of its claims, but by pointing to “extensive evidence that The Post is extremely biased against the Campaign, and against Republicans in general.”

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The court was unimpressed with Trump’s whining that Opinion columnist Greg Sargent is a “liberal writer” who “has published many anti-administration tweets” and that his colleague Paul Waldman “has authored numerous anti-Trump articles and formerly worked for Media Matters for America, an activist organization which is sharply critical of the administration.”

Indeed, Judge Contreras held that the “Complaint is replete with conclusory allegations” and “failed to adequately plead actual malice.” Also that they were protected expressions of opinion, which anyway hyperlinked to articles to support their claims.

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For instance, Sargent’s supposedly defamatory statement not only linked to an article by Benjamin Wittes in the Atlantic, but it included a qualifier in the very next sentence:

Mueller also concluded that Trump and/or his campaign eagerly encouraged, tried to conspire with, and happily profited off of those efforts. Yet Mueller did not find sufficient evidence of a criminal conspiracy.

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And Waldman’s post linked to an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in which Trump explicitly stated that he would take foreign dirt on his opponent:

The 2020 election will obviously be distinct in all kinds of ways we can’t yet anticipate. For instance, who knows what sort of aid Russia and North Korea will give to the Trump campaign, now that he has invited them to offer their assistance?

In fact, just a month before the complaint was filed in March of 2020, Trump was impeached in the House of Representatives for attempting to extort foreign dirt on Joe Biden — so Waldman’s article from June of 2019 was actually prescient. Besides which, the article’s “hyperbolic and colorful tone,” joking that Trump’s campaign pitch is “this election is about me, and also immigrants are coming to kill you,” put it squarely in the category of non-actionable opinion.

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Of course these defamation suits got dismissed. They were never defamation suits in anything but name, although compared to Trump’s post-presidential litigation, they’re a model of sober pleading and competent argument. No all-caps screeching about WITCH HUNT and RUSSIA HOAX, no allegations of a vast conspiracy involving Hillary Clinton, no demand for hundreds of millions of dollars lodged in a Florida court without jurisdiction over the defendants.

In the meantime, Trump has moved on to crazier lawsuits and weirder lawyers. He’s currently suing CNN in Florida for saying that he lied about election fraud. Even if his claims about rampant fraud were false, he actually believed them, and so he’s entitled to $475 million in damages — or so he’d have his appointee Judge Raag Singhal believe, anyway. He’s also filed suit against the Pulitzer board in Okeechobee County Florida for defamatory refusal to revoke prizes awarded in 2019 to the Post and the Times.

Court Dropkicks Yet Another Garbage Trump Defamation Suit. Don’t Worry, There’s More Where That Came From.

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