Trump threatening multiple lawsuits to 'crack down on unfavorable media coverage': report

16 December 2024

On Saturday, December 14, CNN and other media outlets reported that ABC News had reached a settlement in President-elect Donald Trump's defamation lawsuit against the network and "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos. ABC News agreed to pay $15 million to a "presidential foundation and museum" and pay $1 million for Trump's attorney's fees.

This comes at a time when far-right conspiracy theorist Kash Patel, Trump's nominee for FBI director, is drawing a great deal of scrutiny for threatening legal action — either criminal or civil — against journalists.

Patel, during a 2023 appearance on Steve Bannon's "War Room" vodcast, threatened to "come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections."

Patel has also threatened anti-Trump Republican Olivia Troye, who served as a national security aide to former Vice President Mike Pence, with a defamation lawsuit.

The New York Times' David Enrich, in an article published on December 15, stresses that ABC News isn't the only media outlet that Trump and his allies have threatened with legal action.

"The legal threats have arrived in various forms," Enrich explains. "One aired on CNN. Another came over the phone. More arrived in letters or e-mails. All of them appeared aimed at intimidating news outlets and others who have criticized or questioned President-elect Donald J. Trump and his nominees to run the Pentagon and FBI. The small flurry of threatened defamation lawsuits is the latest sign that the incoming Trump Administration appears poised to do what it can to crack down on unfavorable media coverage."

Enrich adds, "Before and after the election, Mr. Trump and his allies have discussed subpoenaing news organizations, prosecuting journalists and their sources, revoking networks’ broadcast licenses and eliminating funding for public radio and television. Actual or threatened libel lawsuits are another weapon at their disposal — and they are being deployed even before Mr. Trump moves back into the White House."

Media attorney Elizabeth McNamara, who represented ABC News and Stephanopoulos in the defamation case, didn't discuss the specifics of that case with the Times but did make a general comment.

McNamara warned, "There's been a pattern and practice for the past couple of years of using defamation litigation as a tactic to harass or test the boundary of case law."

Meanwhile, Trump's incoming administration — according to the Washington Post reporters Isaac Arnsdorf and Jeff Stein — is expecting to be the target of lawsuits in 2025 in response to his executive orders.

"Officials in the incoming Trump Administration have an answer for anyone questioning the validity of several policies they plan to implement immediately and unilaterally: Go ahead and sue," Arnsdorf and Stein report in an article published on December 14. "President-elect Donald Trump has long promised to take executive action to withhold birthright citizenship from people born in the United States to parents who are undocumented immigrants, but his advisers now see a court fight as a goal of that effort, rather than an obstacle."

The journalists add, "Similarly, incoming budget officials have said they want to openly defy a 1974 law by refusing to spend money that Congress has authorized, forcing a lawsuit to test the Watergate-era statute's constitutionality. And aides involved in the transition said they'll plow ahead with reviving a policy from late in Trump's first term making it easier to fire tens of thousands of civil servants despite a Biden Administration policy meant to bolster their protections, leaving individual federal workers to fight their own appeals."

Trump's incoming administration, according to Arnsdorf and Stein, "is betting that Democratic lawyers, environmental groups and civil libertarians have less money and appetite for drawn-out court fights than during the earlier days of the anti-Trump 'resistance.'"

But Lee Gelernt, an immigration attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), expects the second Trump Administration to face more than few lawsuits.

Gelernt told the Post, "I suspect they understand they’re going to get sued for just about everything. There are going to be some initial quick fights, but it’s ultimately going to be a marathon."

Read the New York Times' full article at this link (subscription required) and the Washington Post's full article here (subscription required).

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