By Helen Coster and Jack Queen
NEW YORK (Reuters) – President-elect Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit against the Des Moines Register newspaper and its former top pollster, the day after he stepped up his legal threats against news outlets and said he would also consider suing social media influencers for defamation.
The lawsuit filed Monday night in Iowa’s Polk County seeks “accountability for brazen election interference committed by” the newspaper and pollster J. Ann Selzer over its poll published on Nov. 2. That poll showed Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris leading Trump by three percentage points in Iowa.
“Selzer’s polling ‘miss’ was not an astonishing coincidence—it was intentional,” the lawsuit said. “As President Trump observed: ‘She knew exactly what she was doing.'”
The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages and an order barring the Des Moines Register from engaging in “ongoing deceptive and misleading acts and practices” related to polling.
A Des Moines Register representative said the organization stands by its reporting and believes the lawsuit is without merit.
Selzer declined to comment.
Trump filed the lawsuit just days after ABC News agreed to settle a defamation case he brought by donating $15 million to his presidential library and publicly apologizing for comments by anchor George Stephanopoulos, who inaccurately said the president-elect had been found liable for rape.
Trump has touted the settlement as a major victory, and there are already signs that it could embolden his lawyers on fights with media companies.
On Tuesday, Trump’s lawyers cited the ABC deal in a letter to the judge overseeing the president-elect’s copyright lawsuit against Simon & Schuster over audio recordings of an author’s interviews with Trump, saying they hope the book publisher will “follow Mr. Stephanopoulos’ expression of contrition.”
“Since President Trump’s decisive victory resulting (in) him being due to become the 47th President of the United States, there has been a renewed accountability among those who violated his rights over the last four years,” Trump’s lawyers said.
A representative for Simon & Schuster did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the lawsuit, which was filed in New York federal court.
Some legal experts say Trump’s comments and legal actions risk chilling news coverage of the incoming administration even if legal protections for journalists are for now robust.
“There is some serious concern that the erosion of legal protections could lead to less aggressive news coverage,” said Syracuse University communications professor Roy Gutterman.
The ABC settlement was concerning to Gutterman and other media and legal experts, who said they believed ABC had a good chance of beating the case but may have agreed to settle out of fear of retribution from the Trump administration. The high costs of litigation could have also factored into the decision, the experts said.
The ABC lawsuit centered on Stephanopoulos’ comments about civil cases brought against Trump by writer E. Jean Carroll, who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her at a New York department store in the 1990s.
Stephanopoulos said Trump was found liable for rape, but a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse. New York law distinguishes the two offenses.
Trump is appealing the jury verdict in that case and a judge’s ruling in a related lawsuit brought by Carroll.
An ABC News spokesperson said in a statement that the network was pleased that the parties reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit.
As part of the settlement, ABC agreed to publish an editor’s note stating that the network and Stephanopoulos “regret statements regarding President Donald J. Trump” made during the interview in question.
On Monday, Trump also mentioned his lawsuit against CBS News over an interview with Harris that aired on its “60 Minutes” news program in October. The lawsuit, which seeks $1 billion in damages, claimed CBS deceptively edited the interview.
CBS has said the lawsuit is “completely without merit” and has asked a judge to dismiss the case.
Trump claimed on Monday that “60 Minutes” participated in ”fraud and election interference.”
Any additional lawsuits by Trump would still face steep hurdles in court because U.S. law has some of the strongest protections in the world for news coverage of public figures.
Longstanding legal precedent holds that public figures must prove defendants knew or strongly suspected something was false but said it anyway, a standard known as “actual malice” that is notoriously difficult to prove in court.
Trump has said this legal standard should be changed, and some U.S. Supreme Court justices have expressed willingness to reexamine the precedent.
“The standard remains a strong one, the strongest in the Western world,” said Boston College School of Law professor Jeffrey Pyle.
Even if lawsuits by Trump were to fail, they could create headaches for news organizations by publicly revealing potentially embarrassing internal communications and exposing journalists and executives to depositions.
In the ABC lawsuit, some legal experts said the network could have prevailed because Stephanopoulos’ comments appeared to be an innocent mistake and not the type of reckless disregard that Trump would have to prove.
(This story has been corrected to fix the margin of Des Moines register poll in paragraph 2)
(Reporting by Helen Coster and Jack Queen in New York; Editing by Amy Stevens, Stephen Coates, Franklin Paul and Lisa Shumaker)
