President Trump’s lawyer Marc Kasowitz is making moves to stop a defamation lawsuit in the New York Supreme Court against his client and is using a prior lawsuit against former President Bill Clinton as part of his case.
The lawsuit in question is one filed in January by Summer Zervos, who appeared on season five of Trump’s reality TV show “The Apprentice.” She alleges that in 2007 Trump tried to kiss her twice and attacked her in a hotel room.
Trump denied the allegations, saying he “vaguely” remembers Zervos and that he “never met her at a hotel or greeted her inappropriately a decade ago.”
According to the Hollywood Reporter on Tuesday, Kasowitz intends to file a brief arguing that the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause bars any state lawsuits against a sitting president.
Kasowitz is looking to the Clinton v. Jones Supreme Court case for a boost. A result of that case, when Paula Jones filed a lawsuit in 1994 against Clinton alleging he sexually harassed her while serving as governor of Arkansas, was that the Supreme Court decided in 1997 that no sitting president is immune to civil litigation.
Kasowitz says the “crucial threshold issue” of presidential immunity was “raised, but not decided, by” the case. However, what Kasowitz jumps on is a part of the decision, written by Justice John Paul Stevens, that says these types of cases should be “decided at the earliest possible stage of the litigation” due to the “singular importance of the president’s duties.”
“[A]s in Clinton v. Jones, the public interest mandates that the immunity issue be resolved before proceeding further,” Kasowitz wrote. “The ‘singular importance of the president’s duties’ warrants a stay where civil actions, such as this one, ‘frequently could distract a president from his public duties, to the detriment of not only the president and his office but also the nation that the president was designed to serve.’ Requiring President Trump to litigate the merits on a motion to dismiss the complaint, in addition to moving to dismiss on grounds of presidential immunity, would negate the very interests that that immunity is designed to protect.”
