Lawyers for President Donald Trump are threatening to file a $5 billion dollar defamation lawsuit against a liberal think tank if it does not retract a report critical of the White House’s deployment of National Guard troops to cities across the country.
According to a cease-and-desist letter sent this week, the president has taken issue with an analysis conducted by the Center for American Progress that found the deployments failed to reduce urban crime in the way Trump has repeatedly asserted.
In a statement published on Friday, CAP President and CEO Neera Tanden said the organization stands by its report and will not be taking it down.
“This threatened lawsuit’s attack on facts and evidence is baseless,” Tanden said. “A fundamental protection of the First Amendment is to allow for the publication of facts and analysis that are contrary to the arguments and claims of any administration. A lawsuit is a transparent attempt to silence us. We will neither cower nor bend in the face of it.”
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The letter to CAP, which was first reported by The New York Times, sets a 5 p.m. Friday deadline for the think tank to retract the report, apologize to the president and compensate him — or risk facing a defamation lawsuit for at least $5 billion.
The nine-page letter, which was sent on Monday, also suggests that CAP “manufactured” data that the deployments were not improving urban crime.
“Defendants did not merely draw a different academic conclusion; they defamed President Trump by distorting a contested empirical question into a sensational, false, malicious and defamatory accusation that President Trump knowingly lied to the American people,” attorney Alejandro Brito wrote in the letter.
Tanden, however, insisted that the information in the report, and all of the organization’s work, is grounded in “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. “Since its inception, CAP has published analysis of the impact of government policy under Democratic and Republican administrations.”
CAP also responded to Brito with its own letter, in which it again stood by its report and denied defamation of the president.
“In your letter you claim that the conclusions of this Report defamed the President. This is utterly absurd: truth is not and cannot be defamation. The legal standards here are clear, well-established, and speech-protective,” Kevin H. Metz, general counsel for CAP, wrote.
“Efforts to intimidate and silence non-governmental institutions and citizens that find government policies failing is anathema to a democracy,” Metz added. “Further, threatening an independent think tank for publishing facts about a government policy is a threat to all research institutions.”
During Trump’s presidency, his lawyers have dished out a handful of defamation suits against people or organizations Trump deems foes. Trump first posted about CAP’s report on Truth Social earlier this month.
“How crazy is that,” the president wrote. “The report is just another Radical Left SCAM, as are the people who fund this gaggle of Lunatics … The Dumocrats love it, and are against anything ‘TRUMP.’ These people, and others like them, are so bad for our Country.”
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