Emboldened by ABC settlement, Trump threatens more lawsuits against the press

By Hadas Gold, CNN

New York (CNN) — President-elect Donald Trump had not been terribly successful in suing media organizations until this weekend when ABC News agreed to settle a closely-watched defamation case he brought against the network to the tune of $16 million.

Now, Trump is expanding his threats of legal action against the news media as he prepares to move back into the White House, stating he wants to “straighten out the press.”

On Monday, Trump said he has a new target: The Des-Moines Register newspaper, which he said he plans to sue “today or tomorrow” over its final poll of Iowa voters that showed him losing the November election to Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump made the comments during a wide-ranging press conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida where he said he’d bring the lawsuit against the storied Iowa newspaper because he believed the poll “was fraud and it was election interference.”

The Register’s final poll before Election Day, conducted by legendary pollster J. Ann Selzer, showed Harris leading Trump 47-44% among likely voters in the state, a bombshell result setting off a flurry of coverage that Harris could possibly pull an upset in a state Trump won in 2016 and 2020. Other surveys had found Trump comfortably ahead of Harris in the state.

Trump went on to win the state by a 13-point margin.

“She’s gotten me right always. She’s a very good pollster. She knows what she was doing,” Trump said on Monday.

Lark-Marie Anton, a spokesperson for The Register’s parent company Gannett, said in a statement the newspaper has “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.

In an interview Friday on the PBS show “Iowa Press,” Selzer said she did not know what “went wrong.”

“We have explored everything. The Des Moines Register in an unprecedented move for transparency has put online our cross tabs our weighting system and my analysis that I’ve not needed to update because it was pretty complete,” she said. Selzer previously said she wondered if the intense coverage of her poll helped motivated Trump voters to turn out on Election Day.

Selzer said she was “mystified” by allegations she was politically motivated or had engaged in “election interference,” accusations she takes “very seriously.”

“The idea that I intentionally set up to deliver this response, when I’ve never done that before – I’ve had plenty of opportunity to do it. It’s not my ethic,” she said. “But to suggest without a single shred of evidence that I was in cahoots with somebody, that I was being paid by somebody, it’s hard to pay too much attention to it except that they are accusing me of a crime.”

Reached by CNN on Monday, Selzer said she would decline to comment on Trump’s threat until she saw a legal document.

Trump’s comments about the Register came in response to a reporter’s question about whether the president-elect planned to file more lawsuits, including against social media influencers and other independent figures, following the multimillion-dollar settlement reached with ABC News after he sued the network for defamation.

“I think you have to do it because they’re very dishonest. We need a great media. We need a fair media,” Trump said.

Trump then laid out several other lawsuits he’s brought against the media, including famed journalist Bob Woodward, CBS News’ “60 Minutes” program and the Pulitzer Prize board.

While the threshold for proving defamation is high, requiring proof that an outlet knowingly published false information, even if a lawsuit is tossed by a judge or a media outlet ultimately prevails, the punishment is in the process. Lawsuits can drag on for months or years and can cost companies millions in legal fees.

Some news organizations are already warning their reporters to prepare: Axios recently told its staff to expect an increased number of lawsuits from the Trump administration, Semafor reported.

Trump at one point suggested Monday that the US government should be taking up these lawsuits against the news media, even though some have been filed alleging personal defamation.

“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,” Trump said. “But I have to do it. It costs a lot of money to do it, but we have to straighten out the press.”

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