President Trump’s reelection campaign filed a libel lawsuit against the Washington Post, accusing the outlet of knowingly publishing false information that was detrimental to him.
The lawsuit, which was filed on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, focuses on two stories published in June of 2019 that the president’s team claimed included “false and defamatory statements of and concerning the Campaign.”
One piece cited in the lawsuit, headlined, “Trump just invited another Russian attack. Mitch McConnell is making one more likely,” was written by Greg Sargent for his Plum Line blog and published on June 13. The Trump team took issue with the claim that special counsel Robert Mueller found that Trump’s 2016 campaign “tried to conspire with” a “sweeping and systematic” Russian attack.
Mueller’s report, released in spring 2019, said there was insufficient evidence to charge the Trump campaign with criminal conspiracy with Russia.
The lawsuit also alleged a story published a week later headlined, “Trump: I can win reelection with my base,” and written by Paul Waldman, an opinion writer for the Plum Line blog, was defamatory when it said, “Who knows what sort of aid Russia and North Korea will give to the Trump campaign, now that he has invited them to offer their assistance?”
The lawsuit said the Washington Post was “well aware at the time of publishing” that the statements “were not true.”
Jenna Ellis, the senior legal adviser to the campaign Donald J. Trump for President, said in a statement, “Today the President’s re-election campaign has filed suit against The Washington Post for false statements contained in two published articles, including defamatory claims that the campaign ‘tried to conspire with’ a ‘sweeping and systematic’ attack by Russia against the 2016 U.S. presidential election and ‘who knows what sort of aid Russia and North Korea will give to the Trump campaign, now that he has invited them to offer their assistance?’
“The statements were and are 100 percent false and defamatory,” she continued. “The complaint alleges The Post was aware of the falsity at the time it published them, but did so for the intentional purpose of hurting the campaign, while misleading its own readers in the process. The campaign files suit to publicly establish the truth and seek appropriate legal remedies for the harm caused by false reporting.”
“It’s disappointing to see the President’s campaign committee resorting to these types of tactics and we will vigorously defend this case,” Kristine Coratti Kelly, vice president of communications at the Washington Post, said in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
The lawsuit comes after the reelection campaign filed a similar one against the New York Times last week.
