Trump’s Stupid Libel Lawsuit Against The Washington Post Tossed By Federal Court

Defamation

from the election-loser-just-keeps-on-losing dept

Mr. “I’m going to open up the libel laws” never got around to opening them up. It was another pet project for Trump, one constantly just another couple weeks away from achieving. “Strong looks” were presumably taken by Trump’s legal experts, but even their collective incompetence couldn’t overcome the First Amendment.

Neither can Donald Trump, here represented by his campaign, since it’s the entity that can pay legal bills with money other than Trump’s. This defamation lawsuit against the Washington Post was part of a steady stream of ridiculous lawsuits Trump and his campaign filed over negative press and protected opinions. Trump sued the New York Times and CNN as well, baselessly claiming accurate reporting and observations made by columnists amount to unprotected libel.

Being represented by Charles Harder didn’t help Trump. It didn’t help him in his lawsuit against the Times. It doesn’t help him here either. (h/t Reason)

The DC court’s opinion [PDF] runs 17 pages and details the arguments made by both Trump and the Washington Post. But it all comes down to just a couple of sentences that appear less than halfway through the dismissal.

The Court declines to address each of the parties’ arguments in detail, for it concludes that the Trump Campaign has failed to adequately plead actual malice. That failure alone warrants granting the Post’s motion to dismiss.

The court won’t bother explaining in depth why Trump is wrong. He’s wrong about the legal standard, which means the claims made by Trump and Harder don’t even matter.

That being said, the court does say other stuff, like pointing out that Charles Harder is unclear on the legal definition of “actual malice,” which has nothing to do with cruel intentions and everything to do with recklessly disregarding the truth.

The Trump Campaign argues that the Post and Mr. Sargent’s political bias demonstrates actual malice. Not so. Assuming the Trump Campaign is correct that the Post has consistently supported Democratic presidential candidates and that Mr. Sargent has previously published a commentary critical of Trump, “[i]t is settled that ill will toward the plaintiff or bad motives are not elements of actual malice and that such evidence is insufficient by itself to support a finding of actual malice.”

When your libel lawyer sharpshooter is that far off, things are going to go poorly for you. Whether or not Harder actually believes this definition is legally correct is unclear. But even if he was pressured by Trump to accept this incorrect definition, he should never have allowed that argument to be presented to the court. That’s just bad lawyering.

Trump and his legal rep apparently wouldn’t know actual malice if it walked up and slandered them. They certainly couldn’t find anything resembling it in the Post piece being sued over.

Not only has the Trump Campaign failed to plead sufficient factual allegations supporting an inference of actual malice, the context of the alleged defamatory statement suggests the absence of actual malice. Notably, after claiming that the Mueller Report concludes that the Trump Campaign “tried to conspire with” Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Mr. Sargent continued in the very next sentence, “Yet Mueller did not find sufficient evidence of a criminal conspiracy.” Sargent Article at 4. Those two statements appear in the same paragraph, and read together, the second statement is plainly intended to qualify the first statement. The Sargent Article’s inclusion of the qualifying statement is the kind of action that dispels actual malice.

As for the other article, the court says readers (which include Trump and Harder) were on notice what they were reading was an opinion piece — a place where it’s almost impossible to find an actionable defamation claim. First of all, the article was published in the Post’s “Op-Ed” section, which is where all of its opinion and editorial pieces go.

Second of all, the writer’s writing style made it clear the opinion piece would be full of colorful rhetoric that no reasonable person would take as dry recitation of fact.

In addition to its form, the Waldman Article’s hyperbolic and colorful tone also signal opinion, not fact. See, e.g., Waldman Article at 3 (claiming that Trump’s 2018 midterm messaging was “This election is about me, and also immigrants are coming to kill you.”); id. at 4 (speculating that for the 2020 election, the “president [is] convinced that if he just gets his supporters a little angrier, his victory will be assured”). The opinionated tone of the column is typical fare one finds in “heated political debate” and criticism about a presidential candidate—all part of the “broader social context” in which the statement was made.

And another Trump lawsuit is dispensed with. He has thirty days to try to deliver something actionable to the court, but without finding something else entirely to sue about, Trump won’t be able to provide the court with anything not immediately dismissible.

Of course, the hassle may have been the entire point. Even without winning, Trump managed to drain funds from the Washington Post and, perhaps, encourage less-spirited coverage of his antics by the paper while waiting for a ruling on its merits. Some bullies are dangerous. Some are just tiresome and annoying. Trump is more of the latter now that he can’t wield the power of the executive branch. And his steady stream of garbage lawsuits filed against pretty much anyone who ever published a mean thing about him is yet another reason this great nation of ours needs a federal anti-SLAPP law.

Filed Under: anti-slapp, charles harder, defamation, donald trump, greg sargent, slapp suits
Companies: washington post