NY Times defends reporting against Trump's defamation claims

(CN) — The New York Times struck back Tuesday against President Donald Trump, who claims the paper defamed him during last year’s election season.

“This lawsuit has no merit. It lacks any legitimate legal claims and instead is an attempt to stifle and discourage independent reporting," a spokesperson for the newspaper said in a statement.

“The New York Times will not be deterred by intimidation tactics. We will continue to pursue the facts without fear or favor and stand up for journalists’ First Amendment right to ask questions on behalf of the American people.”

In Monday’s lawsuit, Trump argued the newspaper timed stories containing disparaging statements about him to come out at the height of election season to inflict maximum electoral damage and economic harm against him.

Trump claims that to win the presidency in 2024, he had to overcome “persistent election interference from the legacy media,” which he said was led by The New York Times, as “a full-throated mouthpiece of the Democrat Party.”

In his complaint, Trump points to the newspaper’s front-page endorsement of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and an opinion piece titled “The only patriotic choice for president.” He describes it as “deranged.”

Trump names Times reporters Susanne Craig, Russ Buettner, Peter Baker and Michael S. Schmidt as defendants. Penguin Random House was also named for publishing a book titled “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success,” which Buettner and Craig co-wrote.

The claims center around the book and three articles which were published in the two months leading up to the 2024 presidential election.

Trump uses the bulk of the complaint to assert that Craig and Buettner peddled a false narrative that Trump was discovered for “The Apprentice” by the show’s co-creator and executive producer, Mark Burnett.

“Nonetheless, unwilling to let reality stand in the way of sensational fiction, The New York Times, Craig, Buettner, and Penguin maliciously peddled the fact-free narrative that Burnett somehow “discovered” President Trump for ‘The Apprentice’ and magically transformed him into a celebrity —even though at and prior to the time of publication defendants knew that President Trump was already a megacelebrity and an enormous success in business,” Trump wrote.

In addition to the Sept. 14, 2024, article titled, “The Star-Making Machine That Created ‘Donald Trump," the suit targets two October articles — “For Trump, a Lifetime of Scandals Heads Toward a Moment of Judgment” by Baker and “AsElection Nears, Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator,” written by Schmidt.

The reporters made “numerous false statements” regarding Trump and his father Fred Trump’s business decisions and compliance with federal tax laws “based on incomplete, minimal information” and several years of tax returns, Trump says in the complaint.

A “responsible assessment of the Trump family’s compliance with tax laws would have required forensic auditing, expert tax legal advice, and other expensive investigatory tools” that Trump says would have confirmed that neither him nor his father violated federal tax laws.

In Schmidt’s article, Trump says the reporter used false statements made by his former chief-of-staff John Kelly, who he fired for accusing the president of making admiring statements about Hitler.

Seeking $15 billion in damages, the president must prove as a public figure that the newspaper published a false statement about him with actual malice – meaning they knew the statement was false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth. This standard was established by the Supreme Court in the landmark 1964 case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan .

His lawsuit is the latest of a string of defamation suits he’s filed against media companies and journalists since taking office.

In July, he sued conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch and the Dow Jones Company for $10 billion over a Wall Street Journal article detailing a letter Trump supposedly sent to Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday.

That same month, Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, settled a $20 billion lawsuit filed by Trump over an interview with Harris he argued was deceptively edited on the program “60 Minutes.”

In December, ABC News paid Trump $15 million and issued a statement of regret to settle a lawsuit over a comment in an interview by its anchor George Stephanopoulos that the former president had been “found liable for rape.”

Two similar lawsuits filed in 2023 against the Washington Post and CNN were dismissed.

While Trump has hailed his actions as fighting to restore integrity to journalism, others have blasted his litigation threats as attacks on press freedoms.

“The federal government’s blatant attack on the media is unprecedented in recent history, but not unexpected from a president who has exhibited hostility toward the press for almost a decade,” Ellessandra Taormino from the American Civil Liberties Union said.

“From banning The Associated Press from the White House press pool to suing media companies over their reporting, Trump’s personal and official track record with the media has proven that his administration is willing to dismantle our free press and violate the Constitution,” she added.

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