Donald Trump has amended his defamation trollsuit against the New York Times. Now instead of being 40 pages of incoherent gobbledygook, it’s 62 pages of incoherent gobbledygook. But don’t worry, he’s still seeking just $15 billion in damages. No extra charge for the additional pages!
The lawsuit began inauspiciously, when Judge Stephen Merryday struck the original complaint sua sponte for standing “unmistakably and inexcusably athwart the requirements of Rule 8.” Trump’s sparklemagic lawyer Alejandro Brito really put his back into that first draft, which clocked in at a whopping 85 pages and included Trump’s entire CV, including cameos on Wrestlemania V, All My Children, and The Nanny. But it was not meant to be, and so Brito had to cut more than half of his delicious prose lauding “President Trump’s transcendent ability to defy wrongful conventions.”
Now he’s got to do real law … sort of.
The new complaint purports to establish actual malice by pointing to the source of Trump’s leaked tax returns: former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn. Trump insists that Times reporters Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner “purposefully avoided the truth by failing to independently verify whether the documents that Charles Littlejohn provided them with, and upon which they relied on for the challenged statements in the Book, were legitimate, accurate copies of President Trump’s tax returns.”
This suggests but does not state as fact that the leaked returns were fakes. This is somewhat in tension with the assertion that “Littlejohn was charged with unlawfully stealing and disclosing President Trump’s tax returns on September 29, 2023” and thus the reporters “had reason to doubt the accuracy” of his documents. And it’s deeply in tension with Trump’s own claims in the lawsuit he filed against the IRS seeking billions of dollars in recompense for Littlejohn’s unlawful disclosure.
Either the returns were real, in which case the Times had every reason to rely on them. Or they weren’t, and Trump and Brito just filed a fraudulent lawsuit against the IRS that led to the creation of the January 6 slush fund and blanket immunity for past tax crimes for Trump and his family. If the documents were fake, then the settlement must be invalid, right?
This is obviously the least of the problem with this dumpster fire of a defamation suit. This is a document which argues that it’s defamatory to report that “Trump’s desk showed no signs of real work—no computer, contracts, or files. It was just smothered by newspaper and magazine articles focused on one subject: himself.” But it is yet another sign of the deeply unserious lawyering by the president as he bleeds journalists with endless rounds of pointless litigation.
Pity poor Judge Merryday and his clerks!
Trump v. NY Times [Docket via Court Listener]
Liz Dye produces the Law and Chaos Substack and podcast. You can subscribe by clicking the logo:
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