Trump threatens $5 billion suit over think tank crime report

Donald Trump has threatened the Center for American Progress with a USD 5 billion lawsuit over a report on National Guard deployments and crime. The think tank has refused to retract the analysis, calling the move an attempt to silence criticism.

In Short

• Trump demanded the think tank retract its July 13 report by Friday
• The report said violent crime was already falling before Guard deployments
• Neera Tanden called the legal threat a bid to silence critics

US President Donald Trump has threatened to sue the Center for American Progress unless it withdraws a report that said his National Guard deployments to various cities did not reduce crime, contrary to his claims. In a letter sent on Monday, Trump’s lawyer Alejandro Brito gave the Washington-based think tank until the end of business on Friday to retract the report or face a USD 5 billion lawsuit.

The centre refused to do so, calling the threat an attempt to silence it. Its president and chief executive, Neera Tanden, said the lawsuit threat "is a transparent attempt to silence us. We will neither cower nor bend in the face of it."

The report, published on July 13, criticised the administration for taking credit for a historic fall in violent crime at a time when, it said, the decline was already under way. Its analysis concluded that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard "had no measurable effect on violent crime trends." Tanden said the work was based on the non-profit’s analysis of crime data and that its findings were simply "inconvenient to the Trump administration."

In his letter, first reported by The New York Times, Brito asked the centre to "immediately retract the false, malicious, and defamatory statements made about President Trump." He cited several passages in the report that drew objections from Trump.

One passage highlighted by Brito said, "In an effort to falsely claim his policies have reduced crime, the president is exploiting the fact that violent crime and murder were already declining in the cities his administration targeted with these extreme interventions." Brito said that if the report was not retracted, Trump would have no choice but to seek remedies for the "overwhelming financial and reputational harm that Defendants have caused him to suffer." Attempts to reach Brito on Friday were unsuccessful.

The non-profit’s general counsel, Kevin Metz, rejected the allegation in a reply letter. He said the defamation claim "is utterly absurd: truth is not and cannot be defamation. The legal standards here are clear, well-established, and speech-protective."

At the start of his second term, Trump also threatened a number of law firms with cutting off access to the federal government unless they accepted his demands, and some did. Kevin Goldberg, a First Amendment expert at the Freedom Forum, said such threats were made "for the purpose of trying to push someone into submission rather than actually on the merits of compensating Donald Trump for any harm that might have been caused." The dispute centres on a report the think tank has declined to retract and Trump’s threat of a USD 5 billion lawsuit over it.

With PTI Inputs

- Ends