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By Khaleda Rahman
National Correspondent
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What's New
President-elect Donald Trump is using lawsuits to hit back at his perceived enemies in the media as he prepares to return to office in January.
Trump filed a lawsuit on Monday against former pollster J. Ann Selzer, the Des Moines Register and its parent company for "brazen election interference" over a poll published days before November's election on Monday night, according to documents reviewed by Newsweek.
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The November 2 poll conducted by Selzer, a widely respected pollster who has since retired, was shocking because it showed Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris leading Trump in the Republican-leaning state of Iowa by three percentage points. However, Trump ended up carrying Iowa by 13 points in the election.
A spokesperson for the Register dismissed the lawsuit as meritless in a statement to Newsweek. Selzer has denied setting up the poll to deliver a specific response.
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Why It Matters
Some fear this latest lawsuit shows Trump is emboldened to escalate his use of lawsuits to go after his critics in the media when he returns to office in January.
There are concerns that even if the lawsuits don't succeed, they could still have a chilling effect on the press and its reporting ability.
Although it is unusual for a president or politician to take legal action against a pollster over an unfavorable poll, Monday's lawsuit continues Trump's long-running campaign against media outlets and others he feels have wronged him.
He has sued journalists, news organization and book publishers for coverage that he was not pleased with. In October, he sued CBS News over how it edited a 60 Minutes interview with Harris.
Trump had a victory at the weekend when ABC News agreed to pay $15 million towards a Trump presidential library in order to settle a defamation lawsuit against anchor George Stephanopoulos for inaccurately saying Trump had been found civilly liable for rape.
On the campaign trail, Trump made no secret of his desire for retribution against his perceived enemies. And Kash Patel, Trump's nominee to lead the FBI, has spoken of plans to "come after" those in the media.
What To Know
The latest lawsuit, citing Iowa consumer fraud law, alleges Selzer's poll showing Harris ahead was intended to sway the election. It alleges a pattern by Selzer of trying to influence political races in favor of Democratic candidates and says her large platform offers "a significant and impactful opportunity to deceive voters."
"There was a perfectly good reason nobody saw this coming: because a three-point lead for Harris in deep-red Iowa was not reality," the lawsuit said. "It was election-interfering fiction."
Lark-Marie Anton, a spokesperson for the Register, said: "We believe this lawsuit is without merit. 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 will vigorously defend our First Amendment rights."
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Selzer defended her polling methods and denied she had intentionally set up the poll to deliver a specific response in an interview with PBS in Iowa last week.
"I am mystified about what motivation anybody thinks I had and would act on in such a public poll," she said. "I don't understand it. And the allegations I take very seriously. They're saying that this was election interference, which is a crime.
"The idea that I intentionally set up to deliver this response, when I've never done that before. I've had plenty of opportunities to do it. It's not my ethic."
"But to suggest without a single shred of evidence that I was in cahoots with somebody, I was being paid by somebody, it's all just kind of, it's hard to pay too much attention to it except that they are accusing me of a crime."
What People Are Saying
Seth Stern, advocacy director for the Freedom of the Press Foundation said the lawsuit "creates an environment where journalists can't help but look over their shoulders knowing the incoming administration is on the lookout for any pretext or excuse to come after them."
Political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen saidABC News's settlement has "opened the floodgates for a newly-emboldened Trump to wage legal war against everyone in the media that he doesn't like.
"They have made the entire media ecosystem less safe, and ushered us one step closer to the very brand of illiberal democracy that Trump has threatened for so long. This is what it looks like when a media outlet puts its own interests about the very democracy that they purport to want to protect."
Rick Hasen, a professor at the UCLA School of Law, wrote of the latest lawsuit in a post on his blog: "I don't expect this lawsuit to go anywhere."
What's Next
The outcome of the latest lawsuit remains to been seen but Trump is defiant in his actions and his sentiment is that he will continue to use lawsuits against news outlets where he feels he needs to.
"I'm doing this not because I want to, I'm doing this because I feel I have an obligation to," Trump said about the lawsuits during a press conference on Monday.
"I feel I have to do this. I shouldn't really be the one to do it. It should have been the Justice Department or somebody else but I have to do it. It costs a lot of money to do it. But we have to straighten out the press."
Update 12/18/24, 11:15 a.m. ET: This article has been updated to add a statement from a spokesperson for the Des Moines Register.
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