Trump Threatens Think Tank With Libel Lawsuit For Telling The Truth About National Guard Deployments

from the imagine-being-this-mad-about-facts dept

Whenever Trump doesn’t like the facts, he calls it “fake news” or does what he’s doing here: tries to shoot the messenger by threatening them with a lawsuit.

The administration has been sending National Guard troops to various US cities ever since it became clear its mass deportation efforts weren’t nearly as popular with US residents (or the troops themselves!) as they were with the bigoted ghouls who infested the White House.

Trump claimed the National Guard deployments were necessary because the cities they were sent to (Los Angeles, Washington DC, Chicago, etc.) were so gutted by violent crime that the only solution was one that pushes up against the edges of martial law.

Most of the early deployments targeted states or cities where Trump had failed to secure a majority of the popular vote. Later deployments to Tennessee and Louisiana were actually welcomed by state reps who were more closely aligned with MAGA ideals than the rights and liberties of their states’ residents.

But no matter where the National Guard went, the promised reduction in violent crime failed to materialize. It’s an assumption anyone could make, given that it was more a show of force meant to force more cities and states to bend the knee, rather than a well-designed plan to address alleged crime epidemics.

The Center for American Progress released a report early last month, one that showed National Guard deployments weren’t doing much in terms of crime. Instead, the administration was spending more than a billion dollars ($1.7 billion at last count) in an attempt to take credit for the status quo: a long, sharp decline in violent crime rates that long proceeded either of Trump’s two presidential terms.

In an effort to falsely claim his policies have reduced crime, the president is exploiting the fact that violent crime and murder were already declining in the cities his administration targeted with these extreme interventions. On average, the 11 cities where the National Guard was deployed or threatened to be deployed saw a 14 percent decrease in their 12-month rolling violent crime rate and a 22 percent decrease in their 12-month rolling murder rate from June 2024 to June 2025, before the National Guard was first deployed to Los Angeles.

These recent violent crime trends, predating even Trump’s second inauguration, suggest that, more than likely, violent crime would have continued trending downward in these cities by the end of 2025, regardless of any additional interventions. However, the Trump administration has ignored this fact when reporting year-over-year crime statistics to claim these extreme tactics have made Americans safer.

Trump is the real lagging indicator here. The report was released July 10. It took until a few days ago for Trump to threaten the left-leaning think tank with a bogus libel lawsuit. This threat was delivered by someone in Trump’s personal employ, rather than any of the dozens (or hundreds) of lawyers employed by the federal government, for obvious reasons.

On Monday, one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers, Alejandro Brito, wrote a letter to the center warning that he would file the suit if the group did not fully retract the report, which was published on its website on July 13. The letter, viewed by The New York Times, was addressed to the group’s president and chief executive, Neera Tanden, a longtime Democratic official who served as a senior adviser to President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and to several of its board members.

Mr. Brito claimed that the report about the National Guard was full of malicious and false statements. He gave Ms. Tanden and members of her board until 5 p.m. on Friday to retract it and apologize to Mr. Trump.

Libel lawsuits are personal causes of action. The federal government cannot file a defamation lawsuit on its own behalf. Hence, the need to portray this criticism of the administration’s policies and claims are being portrayed as defaming Trump personally for the sole purpose of silencing critics of this iteration of the federal government.

The New York Times report doesn’t contain anything specific Trump’s lawyer claimed was defamatory in the threat letter he issued on behalf of his boss. It’s safe to assume Brito provided no specifics, but relied on intentional vagueness in hopes of making the legal threat stick. And because it’s an obviously bogus legal threat, the letter concludes with a phrase almost always deployed by people who know they have no legitimate case to make:

The letter ended: “PLEASE GOVERN YOURSELVES ACCORDINGLY.”

No problem, said the Center for American Progress lawyers. We are governed accordingly:

“This is utterly absurd,” the lawyer, Kevin H. Metz, wrote to Mr. Brito. “Truth is not and cannot be defamation.”

Mr. Metz went on to say that the center welcomed the opportunity to make its case in court and receive more information on the National Guard deployments through the process of discovery.

We’ll see if Trump tries to press this case or whether he’ll wander off to yell at the next thing that momentarily makes him angry. But even if he moves off of this particular provocation, he’s still got a year to let this simmer on the back burner.

It’s performative but it still serves a purpose: to deter others who might publish facts Trump doesn’t like but may not have the money, time, or legal acumen to fight back when the president decides he wants to sue in his personal capacity. And while we all know this is meaningless and unjustified, the fact is that Trump has pretty much unlimited amounts of time and money and, apparently, enough lawyers on hand willing to jeopardize their careers and reputations for a guy who ultimately may stiff them when it’s time to collect their legal fees.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, alejandro brito, bogus defamation lawsuit, chilling effect, donald trump, free speech, mass deportation, national guard, trump administration

Companies: center for american progress