‘Wrong’: Fox’s Andy McCarthy Rejects Trump’s Cope on Thrown-Out Wall Street Journal Lawsuit

Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency/Sipa USA via AP Images & AP Photo/Alex Brandon

Conservative legal commentator and Fox News contributor Andy McCarthy rejected President Donald Trump’s attempt at explaining away the dismissal of his defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal in his latest column for National Review.

The $10 billion defamation suit was filed by the president after the newspaper published a story about a letter including a lewd drawing of a woman and a cryptic note allegedly written by Trump and addressed to Jeffrey Epstein for the latter’s 50th birthday.

On Monday, District Court Judge Darrin Gayles dismissed the case, writing that Trump’s lawyers had “not plausibly alleged that the Defendants published the Article with actual malice.”

A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team subsequently revealed that “President Trump will follow Judge Gayles’s ruling and guidance to refile this powerhouse lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and all of the other Defendants. The President will continue to hold accountable those who traffic in Fake News to mislead the American People,” and the president himself weighed in on Truth Social in a post that read:

Our powerful case against The Wall Street Journal, and other defendants, was asked to be re-filed by the Judge. It is not a termination, it is a suggested re-filing, and we will be, as per the Order, re-filing an updated lawsuit on or before April 27th.

McCarthy disputed his characterization of Gayles’s ruling.

“This is wrong. Judge Gayles did not ask that the president refile the suit,” the former federal prosecutor wrote of Trump’s post. “First, the judge found that, because Trump failed to establish actual malice, it would be premature to address the WSJ’s factual claims that the statements in the article are true and, as a matter of law, not defamatory. Those claims are likely to be revisited.”

“Furthermore, after dismantling the president’s paltry, ‘implausible’ showing on actual malice, Gayles heeded precedent holding that a dismissal based on a failure to plead adequate facts ‘should be without prejudice,’ such that the plaintiff has an opportunity to amend the complaint with supplemental facts,” he continued. “Gayles was not asking Trump to supplement his allegations; he was merely stating the unremarkable principle that if Trump has additional facts at his disposal that could establish actual malice, the law gives him the opportunity to try to do that.”

“We will see if the president tries to amend his complaint by pleading facts that truly indicate actual malice. If Trump’s lawyers were aware of such facts, it’s difficult to understand how those facts were not included in the original complaint,” concluded McCarthy. “After all, without them, there’s no prayer of a successful defamation case.”

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