Tonight in Your Rights: Trump's media intimidation faces backlash
Trump's "tedious" lawsuit against the Times is slapped down, his FCC attack-dog retreats, and an award-winning journalist faces deportation.
Trump is using every lever of power he has to attack free speech: the FCC, civil lawsuits, and even immigration enforcement.
All Rise News shows the full scope of the attack — and the pushback.
In a week dominated by Donald Trump’s attempts at media and press intimidation, a federal judge has ended it with a judicial smackdown of the “tedious and burdensome” lawsuit that Trump filed against the New York Times less than a week ago.
Senior U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday’s order drips with frustration at Trump’s “decidedly improper and impermissible” complaint.
“A complaint is not a megaphone for public relations or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally or the functional equivalent of the Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner,” wrote Merryday, a George H.W. Bush appointee who spent three decades on the federal bench.
Actions related to this story
The most popular topic for calling U.S. lawmakers on the app 5 Calls right now is “Stop the Assault on Our Freedom of Speech.”
Trump’s legal team has 25 days to refile a “sober” complaint that can pass muster, and the attorneys sent an anonymously authored statement suggesting that they still plan to pursue the case.
But Merryday warned them to drop the “abundant, florid, and enervating” prose, which the judge witheringly summarized and mocked in the order’s summary:
“The pleader initially alleges an electoral victory by President Trump ‘in historic fashion’ — by ‘trouncing’ the opponent — and alludes to ‘persistent election interference from the legacy media, led most notoriously by the New York Times.’ The pleader alludes to ‘the halcyon days’ of the newspaper but complains that the newspaper has become a ‘full-throated mouthpiece of the Democrat party,’ which allegedly resulted in the ‘deranged endorsement’ of President Trump’s principal opponent in the most recent presidential election. The reader of the complaint must labor through allegations, such as ‘a new journalistic low for the hopelessly compromised and tarnished ‘Gray Lady.’’ The reader must endure an allegation of ‘the desperate need to defame with a partisan spear rather than report with an authentic looking glass’ and an allegation that ‘the false narrative about ‘The Apprentice’ was just the tip of Defendants’ melting iceberg of falsehoods.’ Similarly, in one of many, often repetitive, and laudatory (toward President Trump) but superfluous allegations, the pleader states, '‘The Apprentice’ represented the cultural magnitude of President Trump’s singular brilliance, which captured the [Z]eitgeist of our time.’"
Judge Merryday ordered Trump’s legal team to trim their 85-page complaint by more than half, capping the length at 40 pages.
The lawsuit’s lead attorney Alejandro Brito also filed the defamation suit over the Wall Street Journal’s reporting that Trump sent a letter for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday book. The lawsuit claimed that the letter does not exist, but Epstein’s estate released Epstein’s birthday book — where Trump’s submission appears on page 165 — to the House Oversight Committee pursuant to a subpoena.
Brito is continuing to pursue both cases.
For prominent First Amendment attorney Ken White, known by his online pseudonym “Popehat,” there’s been little disincentive for Trump to file wild defamation claims even if they’re scathingly rebuked.
“He got the complaint out there and got all the news,” White told All Rise News. “This is obscure and rule-based, and his followers won’t care.”
White found it notable that the order came from a “VERY conservative judge,” which shows “how buffoonish Trump and his lawyers are, in a way that offends the professionalism of even judges who might agree with them politically.”
Read the full ruling here.
Watch my conversation with about this development below.
Below the paywall:
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr downplays his role in Jimmy Kimmel’s firing after openly boasting about it, and the Trump administration targets an Emmy-winning journalist for deportation after live-streaming law enforcement.
Plus, Carr’s proposal to help media conglomerates gobble up more local TV markets.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to All Rise News to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.