“According to the suit, the agents were patrolling the streets of Washington, D.C., on June 4, 2020, in response to civil unrest sparked by the murder of George Floyd just 10 days earlier. The agents were allegedly confronted by a mob that included “hostile” individuals and young children. In an effort to de-escalate the situation, the lawsuit states, the agents took a knee.
“As a result of their tactical decision to kneel, the mass of people moved on without escalating to violence,” states the suit, which contrasts the tactic favorably against the actions of British soldiers at the 1770 Boston Massacre. “Plaintiffs did not need to discharge their firearms that day. Plaintiffs saved American lives.”
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The lawsuit alleges that almost immediately upon becoming director of the bureau, Patel began working to terminate all agents that had kneeled on June 4, 2020 — and it goes so far as to argue that the agents would not have been fired had they had the same perceived political affiliations as those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.”
“rather than straightforwardly listing the facts of the case, the complaint spends dozens of pages histrionically detailing how great Trump is and how terrible The New York Times is. It reads less like a formal legal document than one of Trump’s social media posts, calling the Times a “full-throated mouthpiece of the Democrat Party” engaging in “wrong and partisan criticism.”
“This lawsuit has no merit,” the Times said in a statement. “It lacks any legitimate legal claims and instead is an attempt to stifle and discourage independent reporting.”
In its very first statements of fact, the lawsuit brags that Trump “won the 2024 Presidential Election over Vice President Kamala Harris in historic fashion, emerging victorious in both the Electoral College and the popular vote, and securing a resounding mandate from the American people,” which it calls “the greatest personal and political achievement in American history.” It even includes a screenshot of the election results. (During his first term, Trump often passed out copies of the 2016 election map to visitors.)”
This guy obviously has serious personality issues; personality issues that don’t make a good president!
Trump continues to bully and sue to suppress the press and free speech. He knows that just to defend a lawsuit is incredibly expensive, and hopes that people just give in.
“Paramount, which owns CBS, has agreed to settle a laughable lawsuit in which President Donald Trump depicted the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris as a form of consumer fraud that supposedly had inflicted damages “reasonably believed to be no less than” $20 billion. Compared to that risible claim, the amount that Paramount has agreed to pay—$16 million for legal expenses and a contribution to Trump’s presidential library—is pretty puny. It is also less than the $25 million that Trump reportedly demanded during negotiations with Paramount. It is nevertheless $16 million more than Trump deserved based on claims that CBS had accurately described as “completely without merit.”
This humiliating settlement starkly illustrates how the powers of the presidency can be abused to punish news outlets for constitutionally protected speech. It does not bode well for freedom of the press under a president who has no compunction about weaponizing the government against journalists who irk him.
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You can judge for yourself whether the editing of the Harris interview qualified as “lying to the American People.” But there is no question that it was protected by the First Amendment, which does not include an exception for journalism that strikes the president as misleading, biased, or unfair. Trump is avowedly determined to use any tools at his disposal to make sure “no one gets away” with covering the news in a way that offends him, which does not seem like a “win” for anyone who values the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment.”
“For 11 days, Musk — the world’s richest man and a prominent backer of President-elect Donald Trump — allegedly failed to properly disclose that he had acquired a major stake in Twitter, the SEC said in a court filing in Washington. As a result, the agency said Musk benefited from “artificially low prices” as he snatched up shares in the company, which he eventually purchased for $44 billion and renamed X.
“In total, Musk underpaid Twitter investors by more than $150 million for his purchases of Twitter common stock during this period,” the SEC said in its complaint. “Investors who sold Twitter common stock during this period did so at artificially low prices and thus suffered substantial economic harm.””
“The sort of lawsuits Trump is filing against media companies are “the latest workaround that wealthy and powerful people who want to bully the press have found to attempt to circumvent the well-established safeguards for the press under the First Amendment against
“Whether you’re hot or cold on DOGE’s government-slashing potential, everyone agrees it needs data to survive. Record access lawsuits might starve it of them.”
“the lawsuit argues — in often dramatic terms — that the Appointments Clause of the Constitution calls for someone with such significant and “expansive authority” as Musk to be formally nominated by the president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
“There is no greater threat to democracy than the accumulation of state power in the hands of a single, unelected individual,” says the lawsuit, filed by New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez and officials from Arizona, Michigan, Maryland, Minnesota, California, Nevada, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii. “Although our constitutional system was designed to prevent the abuses of an 18th century monarch, the instruments of unchecked power are no less dangerous in the hands of a 21st century tech baron.” Two of the 14 states are led by Republican governors.”
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“The suit filed by the 14 states says the Constitution blocks the president from overriding “existing laws concerning the structure of the Executive Branch and federal spending.” As a result, the suit says, the commander-in-chief from is forbidden from creating — or even “extinguishing” — federal agencies, and from “slashing federal programs or offering lengthy severance packages as a means of radically winnowing the federal workforce,” in a nod to the Trump administration’s “deferred retirement” offer to government employees.”
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“”[T]he President does not have the constitutional authority to unilaterally dismantle the government. Nor could he delegate such expansive authority to an unelected, unconfirmed individual,” Thursday’s lawsuit says.”
“In an interview with Rep. Nancy Mace (R–S.C.) on ABC’s This Week last March, host George Stephanopoulos repeatedly and inaccurately asserted that Donald Trump, now the president-elect, had been “found liable for rape.” A week later, Trump sued ABC and Stephanopoulos for defamation in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, noting that a jury had deemed Trump civilly liable for “sexual abuse,” not “rape.” Over the weekend, ABC News announced that it had reached a $15 million settlement with Trump in the form of a contribution to Trump’s presidential library. ABC also agreed to cover $1 million in Trump’s legal expenses.
The settlement is highly unusual in the annals of Trump’s many lawsuits against news outlets, which typically feature claims with a much weaker legal and empirical basis. Some Trump critics explicitly or implicitly faulted ABC for folding, saying its decision is apt to have a chilling impact on journalism. But any such threat can be mitigated by applying normal standards of journalistic care—standards that Stephanopoulos conspicuously failed to uphold in this case.
In his interview with Mace, Stephanopoulos was talking about two cases involving the journalist E. Jean Carroll’s allegation that Trump sexually assaulted her in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. In one case, a New York jury last year concluded that Carroll had proven, by a preponderance of the evidence, that Trump had “sexually abused” her. The jurors also agreed that Trump had defamed Carroll by calling her a liar and awarded her $5 million in damages. But they expressly concluded that Carroll had failed to prove Trump had “raped” her.”