Trump sues Des Moines Register over poll, promises more lawsuits against news outlets after ABC News settlement
The announcement Saturday that ABC has agreed to commit $15 million toward President-elect Donald Trump's presidential foundation to settle a defamation lawsuit was a rare victory for Trump in years of lawsuits against news organizations.
In the settlement's aftermath, Trump said Monday at a news conference in Florida that he planned to sue the Des Moines Register over a poll and vowed to continue filing suits against news outlets whom he's long accused of bias. He followed through with that threat later Monday morning, records show, filing against the newspaper in Polk County, Iowa.
Trump complained at the press conference that the pollster, J. Ann Selzer, "said I was going to lose by three or four points," after previous Iowa surveys showed he'd win the state easily, "by 20 points." Trump won the state by 13 points.
"In my opinion, it was fraud and it was election interference," he said, adding, "we'll probably be filing a major lawsuit against them today or tomorrow."
The lawsuit accuses Selzer and the paper of "brazen election interference" for publishing the poll.
Lark-Marie Anton, a spokesperson for the Des Moines Register, said in a statement to CBS News, "We have acknowledged that the Selzer/Des Moines Register pre-election poll did not reflect the ultimate margin of President Trump's Election Day victory in Iowa by releasing the poll's full demographics, crosstabs, weighted and unweighted data, as well as a technical explanation from pollster Ann Selzer."
"We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe a lawsuit would be without merit," Anton said.
Such litigation is unusual for presidents to pursue, according to Ohio University professor Aimee Edmondson. Trump has a long history of suing the media, she said, though his lawsuits aren't often successful.
"It's a rarity that he would actually win a settlement against a journalistic outlet, when I saw that I was astonished," said Edmondson, who researches media law and journalism history.
Trump has sued CNN, The Washington Post and the New York Times multiple times, including during his first term in office. It's a tactic he pursued both before and after his presidency, suing journalists and their book publishers, and major outlets — including CBS News — for coverage he didn't like.
Edmondson said the lawsuits appear to have an added benefit for Trump.
"He has really done a good job repeating that message that journalists are the enemy of the people," Edmondson said.
During the press conference on Monday, Trump said, "I feel I have to do this," and added, "It costs a lot of money to do it but we have to straighten out the press."
While Trump's recent lawsuits have focused on outlets that are subsidiaries of deep pocketed corporations, Edmondson said she worries they might inspire others to sue "mom and pop" local media in response to coverage.
"Think of the state and county local officials, who might say, "Oh, this will be a great way to punish local journalists," Edmondson said.
Trump's suits often demand extraordinary figures from the defendants. Trump sued Timothy O'Brien after the journalist wrote a book questioning Trump's claims about his own net worth, demanding $5 billion in damages. The case was dismissed, and Trump later told a reporter for The Washington Post that he knew he couldn't win the suit.
"I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make his life miserable, which I'm happy about," Trump said.
Trump sued ABC for defamation after anchor George Stephanolopous said that Trump had been "found liable for rape" during a March 10 interview with Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina.
A unanimous civil jury in 2023 found Trump liable for sexual abuse of the writer E. Jean Carroll. The sexual abuse claim included an allegation that Trump forced his fingers inside Carroll against her will. The federal judge who presided over the case later wrote, "the jury implicitly found Mr. Trump did in fact digitally rape Ms. Carroll."
Trump sued CBS News in October, accusing the network of "deceitful" editing of a "60 Minutes" interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump has claimed CBS News edited Harris' response to a question about conflict in the Middle East in order to mislead the public. He reiterated that claim Monday.
"They took Kamala's answer which was a crazy answer, a horrible answer, and they took the whole answer out and they replaced it with something else she said later in the interview," Trump claimed.
CBS News said in a statement after the lawsuit was filed that its claims are "completely without merit." The network said it will vigorously defend against the lawsuit.
CBS filed a motion to dismiss the suit on Dec. 6, arguing the case has no merit and that it should not have been filed in Texas, which is home to neither the defendant or plaintiff. CBS is New York-based, and Trump lives in Florida.
Trump has also sued journalist Bob Woodward and publisher Simon & Schuster in January 2023, claiming Woodward publicly released interview recordings made for the book "Rage" without Trump's permission.
Trump said Monday that Woodward "didn't quote me properly from the tapes," and he claimed Woodward "sold the tapes, which he wasn't allowed to do."
The publisher's parent company at the time, Paramount Global, was named as a defendant as well. Paramount is also CBS News' parent company.
Soon after the case was filed, Simon & Schuster and Woodward released a joint statement calling the lawsuit meritless.
"All these interviews were on the record and recorded with President Trump's knowledge and agreement," the statement said. "Moreover, it is in the public interest to have this historical record in Trump's own words. We are confident that the facts and the law are in our favor."
The case is ongoing, and the defendants have asked a judge to dismiss the suit.
In 2022, Trump sued the board that bestows journalism's most prestigious award, the Pulitzer Prize. The case revolves around a statement the board made reaffirming its decision to give The New York Times and The Washington Post an award in 2018 for reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
An investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller III later found "insufficient evidence to charge a broader conspiracy."
Trump said Monday, "it turned out to be a hoax and they were exactly wrong."
The Pulitzer Prize Board put out its statement after Trump called for it to revoke its 2018 awards. The board said two independent reviews found "no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes."
A Florida judge in July rejected an effort by the defendants to have the case dismissed. It remains ongoing.