Maggie Haberman Blasts Trump’s ‘Bullying Campaigns’ as She’s Asked About ‘BS’ $15 Billion Lawsuit on MS

The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman blasted President Donald Trump’s “bullying campaigns” when asked on MS NOW about the president’s “BS” $15 billion suit against the Times.

Haberman joined MS NOW’s The Weeknight on Tuesday evening to discuss her latest reporting on “ballooning” costs for Trump’s Qatar plane, which is currently being upgraded to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Michael Steele wrapped up the interview by asking about Trump’s defamation suit (Haberman is not listed as a defendant). The latest from the lawsuit is a judge gave Trump and his team until August 27 to amend the suit, the second chance they’ve gotten to do so.

Trump took a victory lap after the decision, but the Times fired back, saying, “The judge’s decision makes no statement in support of the frivolous accusations in Mr. Trump’s earlier complaint. To the contrary, the judge simply gives him yet another chance to draft a complaint that demonstrates any legal merit.”

As Steele noted, though Haberman is not listed in the lawsuit, Trump has targeted her and accused her of “bad reporting” and said she’ll “pay the price when the lawsuit gets to court.

“How do you and your colleagues suffer through this BS from this administration when at the same time he’s doing this, he’s calling and trying to get your attention to drop stories, and members of his administration want you to know what they’re doing and want you to tell a particular slant on the stories that they want to see,” Steele said.

Haberman argued administrations trying to slant stories is nothing new, but she called out the lengths to which Trump will go to in his “bullying campaigns.”

She said:

This president has reacted quite aggressively to any coverage that he doesn’t like, and most of the coverage… So and that has been the case throughout most of his life. Long before he was in elected office, he has been using a couple of cudgels. And again, this is a theme that we write about in the book, to attack various industries and he has these bullying campaigns and retribution campaigns against various industries. But one is this inside/outside effort where he sues somebody privately, and then he also is using the government. And we have seen that with the [executive orders] against law firms, which didn’t hold up very well in court, but which they got what they wanted out of them, which was a bunch of negative stories for the the firms in question and concerns by those firms about taking on certain clients. He’s used it against universities, including Harvard, but they’re far from the only ones. He’s used it against the news media.

She added the intention is to have a “chilling effect” against political adversaries.

“This is an example of that. And the intention is absolutely to have a chilling effect. All I can say is that my colleagues and I will continue to report the truth, and we will continue to do our jobs and responding to intimidation tactics is not something that we’re going to do,” Haberman said.

Watch above via MS NOW.

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