Over the weekend, we learned that ABC News had settled
a defamation lawsuit with Trump for $15 million.
The lawsuit alleged that ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos had
defamed Trump when he misspoke several times during an interview
and said that a jury had found Trump liable for
rape when it actually found him liable for sexual abuse.
It's worth noting here that the judge in that very
case clarified that the jury's verdict did not mean that
Trump's accuser failed to prove that Mister Trump raped her,
as many people commonly understand the word rape.
But it's hard to imagine that Donald Trump brought that
lawsuit because he really cared about the legal distinctions here.
Trump likely brought that lawsuit as part of a campaign
to silence his critics and to keep controversy at Bay.
And that campaign is ratcheting up.
At a press conference yesterday, Trump celebrated the ABC settlement
and indicated that he wanted to bring lawsuits against even
more media outlets.
The newspaper Donald Trump was threatening there is the Des
Moines Register, the paper of record for the state of
Iowa.
The pollster Trump mentioned is veteran pollster and Seltzer, who
published a poll in the final week before the election
showing Donald Trump behind in a reliably red state.
Late last night, Trump made good on his threat and
officially filed suit against the Des Moines Register and Ann
Selzer for publishing that poll.
Now, the suit was brought not as a defamation case,
but as an alleged violation of Iowa's consumer fraud protection
laws.
The Register poll in the question was spectacularly wrong, as
a number of polls in the election were.
And Trump went on to win Iowa by 13 points,
which was actually a wider margin than his victory in
2020 and in 2016.
But Trump's allegation here is that the poll was somehow
manipulated to make him look bad, and that allegation appears
completely unfounded.
It is hard to imagine how that claim will stand
up in court.
But that may not actually be the point here.
A legal battle with Trump is going to likely be
very, quite costly for the Des Moines Register at a
time when the paper does not have considerable resources with
which to fight.
The Des Moines Register's parent company, Gannett, is the largest
newspaper publisher in America, but it has been losing money
at a steady clip for the last few years.
Gannett lost more than $19 million in the third quarter
of this year alone.
And to understand how the paper found itself in such
a vulnerable financial position, you have to look past Donald
Trump.
And you need to look at the man who was
standing next to Trump at that same press conference.
Do you see him in this picture?
Now, the reason Trump called that press conference in the
1st place was to celebrate a supposed $100 billion U.S.
investment from a company called SoftBank.
And that company is headed by the CEOA man named
Maya Yoshi Masayoshi Son, who is known to the business
community simply as Masa.
Masa is the 51st richest billionaire in the world according
to Forbes, which has called Masa one of the world's
most powerful people.
From 2019 until 2021, Masa's company owned the Des Moines
Registers parent company, Gannett, through a private equity subsidiary called
Fortress Investment Group.
Fortress then merged Gannett with another newspaper company to make
themselves the largest newspaper owners in America, and then they
started hacking away at newsrooms across the country.
From 2019 to 2021, Gannett cut more than a third
of its staff while its private equity owners raked in
10s of millions of dollars in management fees, according to
Axios, since 2019, Gannett has dropped its number of local
focused websites by 117 and it decreased its number of
weekly newspapers by 127.
Today, 1 of Gannett's largest shareholders is another private equity
firm called Apollo Capital.
And Apollo is run by Mark Rowan, a man who
literally just weeks ago was considered one of Trump's top
contenders to be Treasury Secretary.
So Donald Trump is bringing an expensive lawsuit against the
Des Moines Register, and at the same time he is
surrounding himself with the billionaires and private equity managers who
have been working to drain that newspaper and others like
it of precisely the resources they need to fight back.
All of this is happening at a time when America's
billionaires are tripping over themselves to kiss Trump's ring.
Today, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos is reportedly meeting with Trump
at Mar a Lago.
That comes as we are learning that Trump has either
met with or is expected to meet with Amazon founder
and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook,
and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.
Late last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the
day before Thanksgiving, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg dined with the
president-elect on a patio at Mar a Lago.
At one point, Zuckerberg and other attendees stood hand over
heart as the club played a rendition of the national
anthem sung by imprisoned defendants who are accused of crimes
related to the January 6th capital riot.
The irony of pledging allegiance to a song sung by
accused insurrectionists maybe didn't register for Mark Zuckerberg, or maybe
you just didn't care.
This is one of the big differences, I think, between,
we were talking about it before, one of the big
differences between the first term and the first term.
Everybody was fighting me in this term.
Everybody wants to be my friend.
I don't know, my personality changed or something.
Joining me now is Rick Hassan, director of the Safeguarding
Democracy Project at UCLA Law.
Rick, thank you for being here tonight.
I first just want to talk to you about the,
the scope of this lawsuit against the Des Moines Register.
And it's not a defamation suit similar to the ABC
lawsuit.
It is been filed under Iowa's Consumer Fraud Act.
How is that meaningful?
You know, how is that a meaningful difference and, and
what does that entail?
What is the sort of difference between that and a
classic definition suit?
Well, so this law is primarily meant to to protect
consumers who are sold fraudulent goods, sold goods without warranties,
built out of money.
It's not typically used for political purposes.
It's not typically used for polling.
And so they're really, I think, 3 big hurdles that
Trump would face in this lawsuit, assuming that it goes
forward from this complaint.
First, is that he probably can't prove some of the
elements of the complaint like that the Des Moines Register
made false statements.
So long as they were accurately reporting the results of
their poll, there's nothing false there.
They also don't seem to have been providing any false
information to deceive consumers.
Trump goes out of his way to talk about how
this is merchandise and services can kind of merchandise.
It's very convoluted.
It doesn't really fit.
So that's another problem.
And then there's a bigger problem, which is the 1st
Amendment defamation, like this Iowa suit is a, it's a
kind of tort suit.
The one is common law, 1A statutory.
But what the Supreme Court has said is that when
it comes to political speech in the defamation context, we
need to provide breathing room when people criticize public figures.
And so you have to prove what's called actual malice,
which means the statements are made either with knowing falsity
or with reckless disregard as to whether it's true or
false.
And although I'm not aware of any cases where the
Iowa consumer fraud statute has been subject to an actual
malice standard in this context, where you have a candidate
trying to attack a poll he doesn't like just because
he didn't like the result without any evidence it was
a falsified pull.
It seems to me there's going to be a strong
First Amendment defense here if we even, you know, got
to whether or not the elements of the tort could
be met.
Yeah, I mean, just that I'm having a bit of
a hard time understanding the basic logic, if we're looking
at it from the consumer fraud piece, like Ann Selzer
and the Des Moines Register are to some degree discredited
by the virtue of the fact that this poll was
so off, right?
Like a company doesn't willfully make products that it knows
are going to be defective and revealed in stunning fashion
to be defective because that's bad for business, right?
That's just a very kind of ill advised sort of
fraud, if in fact it is even fraud, right?
Basic logic dictates that they would want to be accurate
as opposed to being inaccurate from a, from a consumer
kind of business marketplace standpoint.
Is that right?
Sure, sure.
And remember, who the plaintiff is here is Donald Trump.
You know that, you know he's lost money because of
this.
It's just the whole thing doesn't fit.
And you might ask, well, why didn't he just sue
for defamation?
Well, because he he wouldn't be able to meet the
requirements to prove defamation.
This is very different than the ABC suit where there
was a statement that was made by someone and you
could argue about whether that statement was false and what
it was made with actual malice here.
This is kind of garden variety polling.
And, you know, I can't get into anyone's head, but
it sure seems like this lawsuit is meant to deter
negative information about Donald Trump.
Whether it's polling or something else, it's meant to be
a deterrent because you know, when you buy a lawsuit,
even if it's non meritorious, it's very expensive to litigate
these things.
And of course, when you're litigating against one of the
most powerful people in the world, that itself can be
quite intimidating.
Rick, the Trump said that he he really wants that
his DOJ to be fighting these battles in the future
on his behalf.
This is what he said.
Let's just take a listen to that really quickly.
And I feel I have to do this.
I shouldn't really be the one to do it.
It should have been Justice Department or somebody else.
But I have to do it costs a lot of
money to do it.
But we have to straighten out the press.
Our press is very corrupt.
Is that feasible?
I mean, should we look forward to, as members of
the Press of DOJ launching suits like this?
Or is that a sort of a dream that may
have to be deferred given the fact that the Justice
Department, I don't know, sometimes is run according to the
actual law?
Well, we don't know what the political appointees of the
Justice Department have planned.
I mean, there are lots of things that could be
done to deal with the press.
For example, you know, going after journalists who refused to
reveal confidential sources.
You know, there are certain kinds of protections that are
not necessarily constitutionally required for the press, but that the
Biden Department of Justice has been willing to put in
place in order to protect the press as an important
part of our society and serving in a function and
investigating and educating the public.
Even if there are no lawsuits being filed against the
press, there's plenty that can be done that could undermine
the investigative functions of the press.
And that could, especially when you're talking about smaller entities,
could deter them if they don't have the resources or
if they're even larger entities, if the corporate sponsors of
those entities don't want the fight, you might see them
like ABC News just rolling on and saying, I'm not
going to fight this battle this time.