BS BULLETIN:
- President Trump is threatening the Center for American Progress with a staggering $5 billion defamation lawsuit over a report claiming his National Guard deployments didn’t reduce violent crime.
- The liberal powerhouse, led by longtime Clinton and Biden adviser Neera Tanden, refused Trump’s demand to retract the report and apologize.
- Tanden fired back in a public statement: “We will neither cower nor bend in the face of it.”
President Donald Trump wants a prominent liberal think tank to take back what it said about his National Guard crime crackdown.
Or prepare for one heck of a lawsuit.
Trump’s attorneys have threatened the Center for American Progress with a $5 billion defamation suit over a report accusing the president of falsely taking credit for falling violent crime rates in cities where National Guard troops were deployed.
Trump demanded a retraction.
CAP’s answer? No.
And the organization isn’t exactly keeping its refusal quiet. Center for American Progress President and CEO Neera Tanden said in a public statement Friday that the organization’s research was based on crime data and stood by its conclusions. “A lawsuit is a transparent attempt to silence us,” Tanden said in the statement. “We will neither cower nor bend in the face of it.”
If Tanden’s name sounds familiar, it should.
She served in the Biden White House, worked as an adviser to Hillary Clinton and served in the Clinton administration. CAP itself was founded by John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s former White House chief of staff who later chaired Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
So this isn’t exactly Trump picking a fight with a politically neutral neighborhood statistics club. The fight centers on a CAP report published July 13 examining National Guard deployments in Washington, Los Angeles and Memphis. CAP argued that violent crime and murder were already declining before Trump returned to office and concluded there was “no evidence” the Guard deployments had reduced violent crime. The report went considerably further than disputing Trump’s interpretation of statistics. It accused the president of trying to “falsely claim” credit for declining crime and described the deployments as a “dangerous power grab.”
Trump’s lawyer Alejandro Brito responded with a cease-and-desist letter demanding that CAP retract the report and apologize. Brito argued in the letter that CAP wasn’t merely reaching a different conclusion from the data. “Defendants did not merely draw a different academic conclusion,” Brito wrote. He accused the organization of turning a disputed empirical question into a defamatory claim that Trump knowingly lied to Americans.
The letter warned that failure to retract could result in Trump seeking $5 billion over what his attorneys described as financial and reputational harm.
The deadline was Friday. CAP didn’t blink.
The organization’s general counsel, Kevin Metz, rejected Trump’s allegations in a written response, calling the defamation claim “utterly absurd” and arguing that the report is protected speech. Tanden also released a statement Friday saying CAP’s work is based on “rigorous, evidence-based research and analysis.” “Based on analysis of crime data, our report demonstrated facts about the National Guard deployments that are inconvenient to the Trump administration,” Tanden said in the statement.
CAP has continued leaning into the confrontation.
On Monday, the organization published another piece declaring that Trump’s “baseless threats” would not stop its research and soliciting support for its work. Trump’s legal team, meanwhile, maintains that CAP crossed the line between criticizing a president’s policy and falsely accusing him of deliberately deceiving the public. That would become enormously important if the threatened lawsuit is actually filed.
Public figures face a notoriously high hurdle in American defamation cases. Trump would have to contend with strong First Amendment protections surrounding political speech and policy analysis — particularly criticism directed at the president of the United States.
But $5 billion has a way of getting people’s attention before anyone ever reaches a courtroom.
DBS WIRE SOURCES:
- Just the News — Trump vows to sue Clinton-associated think tank for report Guard deployment didn’t lower DC crime
- Associated Press — Trump threatens lawsuit against nonprofit that questioned whether National Guard plan lessened crime
- CBS News — Trump threatens defamation suit against left-leaning think tank
- Center for American Progress — Baseless threats from the Trump administration won’t stop CAP’s independent research
