Trump campaign says it is suing New York Times over Russia opinion piece
WASHINGTON, (Reuters) President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign said on Wednesday it was filing a libel suit accusing the New York Times of intentionally publishing a false opinion article that suggested Russia and the campaign had an overarching deal in the 2016 U.S. election.
In an escalation of the Republican president’s long-running battle with the news media, campaign officials said the lawsuit was being filed in state court in New York.
Asked about the suit at a White House news conference later on Wednesday, Trump said the New York Times had “got a lot wrong over the last number of years.”
Trump said he would let the lawsuit “work its way through the courts. And there’ll be more coming.” He did not elaborate.
A campaign statement said the aim of the suit against the Times, among the most prominent American news organizations, was to hold the newspaper “accountable for intentionally publishing false statements against President Trump’s campaign.”
The lawsuit relates to a March 27, 2019, opinion article written by Max Frankel, who served as executive editor of the New York Times from 1986 to 1994.
A draft copy of the suit, attached to a campaign news release, accused the newspaper of “extreme bias against and animosity toward the campaign,” and cited what it called the Times’ “exuberance to improperly influence the presidential election in November 2020.”
Trump is seeking re-election on Nov. 3. In a statement, a New York Times spokesperson said: “The Trump Campaign has turned to the courts to try to punish an opinion writer for having an opinion they find unacceptable. Fortunately, the law protects the right of Americans to express their judgments and conclusions, especially about events of public importance. We look forward to vindicating that right in this case.”
The newspaper’s spokesperson said it had not been served with the suit and learned about it through media reports.
Trump’s criticism of what he calls liberal bias in the U.S. news media plays well with his conservative political base and generates applause at his political rallies, where his supporters often jeer journalists. Trump regularly refers to various news media outlets as “fake news” and has called elements of the U.S. news media “the enemy of the American people.”
The New York Times was involved in a landmark 1964 Supreme Court ruling that has served as a safeguard for media reporting on public figures. In the case New York Times v. Sullivan, the court decided that the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment protection for freedom of the press allows even statements that are false to be published as long as the publication was not done with “actual malice.”
The suit, according to the draft copy released by the campaign, accused the newspaper of a “malicious motive” and “reckless disregard for the truth.”
Benjamin Zipursky, a professor at Fordham University School of Law, said the lawsuit was unlikely to succeed because U.S. defamation law does not allow liability for a sincerely held belief about a public figure, like Trump. He said judges would be skeptical of the claims and inclined to dismiss them.
“They’re going to be very concerned with the First Amendment implications of allowing a case like this to move forward,” he said.
SANDERS ASSAILS LAWSUIT
Senator Bernie Sanders, the frontrunner in the race for the Democratic nomination to face Trump in the November election, denounced the lawsuit.
“Trump has called the press the ‘enemy of the people,’ and now - taking a page from his dictator friends around the world - is trying to dismantle the right to a free press in the First Amendment by suing the New York Times for publishing an opinion column about his dangerous relationship with Russia,” Sanders said.
Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller documented Moscow’s campaign of hacking and social media propaganda to boost Trump’s 2016 candidacy and harm his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. Mueller’s report documented numerous contacts between people associated with Trump’s campaign and Russians.