Trump Sues NY Times For Libel Over Opinion Piece On Russia

President Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign is suing The New York Times for libel over a 2019 opinion piece on the Russia scandal.

The suit takes aim at an opinion piece written in March 2019 by former Times executive editor Max Frankel titled “The Real Trump-Russia Quid Pro Quo.” The piece argued that the true collusion between Trump and Russia was his administration’s “pro-Russian foreign policy,” which Frankel cast as a response to Russia helping Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016.

In a statement, Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis rejected Frankel’s argument that “the campaign had an ‘overarching deal’ with ‘Vladimir Putin’s oligarchy’ to ‘help the campaign against Hillary Clinton’ in exchange for a new pro-Russian foreign policy, starting with relief from … economic sanctions.”

“The statements were and are 100 percent false and defamatory,” Ellis wrote in the statement.

To win their lawsuit, which seeks millions of dollars in damages, the Trump campaign will have to prove something quite difficult in court, as CNBC’s Christina Wilkie points out:

NEW: The Trump campaign has sued The New York Times for libel over an opinion article.

Suit claims the Times must’ve known the *March 2019* op-ed was false because of what was in the *April 2019* Mueller report. https://t.co/IPJaSB8gG5

— Christina Wilkie (@christinawilkie) February 26, 2020

“The complaint alleges The Times was aware of the falsity at the time it published them, but did so for the intentional purpose of hurting the campaign while misleading its own readers in the process,” Ellis stated. That’s the bar the Trump campaign will have to clear to win against the Times — and it’s an exceedingly high one.

Read the full filing here.

UPDATE: The New York Times responded to the lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign.

In a statement, The Times wrote, in part, “The Trump campaign has turned to the courts to try to punish an opinion writer for having an opinion they find unacceptable. Fortunately, the law protects the right of Americans to express their judgments and conclusions.”