by Catherine Smith
President Trump’s campaign filed a multimillion-dollar libel lawsuit against The Washington Post on Tuesday alleging defamation in two opinion articles published last year that it said falsely claimed the Trump presidential campaign conspired with Russia according to The Hill.
The lawsuit, filed Monday in Washington, D.C., came a week after the campaign sued The New York Times for defamation over an op-ed that claimed a quid pro quo between Trump and Russia.
The lawsuit cites two Washington Post opinion pieces, a June 13 piece by Greg Sargent said Trump “tried to conspire with” a “sweeping and systematic” attack by Russia in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The second is a June 20 opinion piece by Paul Waldman who asked “who knows what sort of aid Russia and North Korea will give to the Trump campaign, now that he has invited them to offer their assistance?”
The lawsuit, which accuses the Post newspaper owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, of harboring “extreme bias” against the Trump campaign and Republicans generally and claims the articles will require costly efforts for the campaign to correct the record.
“The defamatory article has forced, and will force the campaign, to expend funds on corrective advertisements and to otherwise publicize the facts that it did not conspire with Russia in 2016 and is not seeking Russia’s or North Korea’s help in the 2020 election,” the lawsuit states. “The campaign was damaged in the millions of dollars, the specific amount to be proven at trial.”
“The statements were and are 100 percent false and defamatory,” Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser to the Trump campaign, said in a statement.
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Catherine Smith is a newcomer to Washington D.C. She met, and married an American journalist and moved to D.C from the U.K. She graduated with a B.A in Graphic, Media and Communications and worked in design and retail in the U.K.
Background Photo “Washington Post Building” by Dion Hinchcliffe. CC BY-SA 2.0.
