Judge rejects Justice Dept. bid to short circuit defamation case brought by woman who accused Trump of rape

WASHINGTON » A federal judge on Tuesday rejected the Justice Department’ s bid to make the U.S. government the defendant in a defamation lawsuit brought by a woman who says President Donald Trump raped her decades ago, paving the way for the case to again proceed.

In a 59-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan wrote that Trump did not qualify as a government “employee” under federal law, norwas he acting “within the scope of his employment” when he denied during interviews in 2019 that he had raped journalist E. Jean Carroll in a Manhattan department store during the 1990s.

Carroll sued Trump over that denial inNewYork inNovember, and last month, the Justice Department moved the case to federal court and asked a judge to substitute the U.S. government as the defendant. The department argued Trump was “acting within the scope of his office as President of theUnited States” when he disputed Carroll’s allegations.

Them aneuver was a bid to short circuit the case. If the judge had done what the Justice Department asked, government lawyers could then have invoked the notion of “sovereign immunity” - which prohibits lawsuits against the government - to end the case.

“The President of the United States is not an ‘employee of the Government’ within the meaning of the relevant statutes,” the judge wrote. “Even if he were such an ‘employee,’ President Trump’s allegedly defamatory statements concerning Ms. Carroll would not have been within the scope of his employment.”

The case, though, will remain in federal court, and the Justice Department’ s maneuver alone by itself stalled proceedings that might have been politically damaging for Trump ahead of next week’s election.