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As Trump scrambles wildly to round up a team of experienced Florida criminal lawyers to represent him in the documents case, his prospects in another piece of Sunshine State litigation are looking up … sort of. Trump has now secured replacement counsel in his defamation LOLsuit against CNN after attorney Jim Trusty made his exit from Trumpland complete, withdrawing from both the documents case and the civil suit against the network.
In October, Trump filed one of his signature SLAPP suits to “vindicate” the First Amendment, this time against CNN in federal court in Florida. Inviting the court to disregard the NYT v. Sullivan precedent, he demanded $475 million because the network’s commentators slammed him for his “Big Lie” election fraud claims.
Even though the actual malice standard is met here, in circumstances like these, the judicially-created policy of the “actual malice” standard should not apply because “ideological homogeneity in the media—or in the channels of information distribution—risks repressing certain ideas from the public consciousness just as surely as if access were restricted by the government.” Suits like these do not throttle the First Amendment, they vindicate the First Amendment’s marketplace of ideas.
Jim Trusty, Trump’s original counsel, is an experienced criminal lawyer from DC, although he does not appear to have much of a First Amendment practice. Luckily, Lindsey Halligan, a young insurance defense lawyer currently orbiting around Trump, is admitted in the Southern District of Florida. So when Trusty withdrew “citing irreconcilable differences between Counsel and Plaintiff,” Trump still had local representation.
But now Alejandro Brito, a commercial litigator from Coral Gables, has stepped into the breach, entering his appearance yesterday. Brito recently filed a $500 million defamation suit against Trump’s erstwhile lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen for saying mean stuff about the former president in his book and on his podcast. The case was docketed in Miami, because you can listen to Cohen’s show there on the internet, and his book is available in the Miami Barnes & Noble, ipso facto personal jurisdiction. And once you’ve put your name on that garbage fire, what’s one more, right?
Asked by Law.com about filing the Cohen suit soon after Trump and his lawyer Alina Habba got sanctioned by US District Judge Donald Middlebrooks for filing a frivolous civil RICO suit against Hillary Clinton, James Comey, and the DNC, Brito pointed to all the “other lawsuits that did not result in sanctions or adverse consequences to his lawyers.”
“As far as the limited cases that you are referencing, I prefer not to comment on the actions of other lawyers in matters that I was not involved in,” Brito went on. “But I can assure you that over the span of 26 years of practice, while I certainly represent my clients aggressively, I have not and do not file frivolous lawsuits, or engage in unethical conduct.”
Luckily, the CNN suit is before Judge Raag Singhal, a Trump appointee, who recently heard a similar suit against CNN from yet another Trump lawyer, Alan Dershowitz. That suit was dismissed, although without sanctions. As for Trump’s CNN suit, there may be precious little left to do. The network’s motion to dismiss was fully briefed in December, with no decision by the court. The only other action on the docket has been a notice of supplemental authority by CNN pointing to Judge Middlebrooks’s decision, as well as Judge Rudolph Contreras’s order tossing a similar Trump suit against The Washington Post.
So perhaps Brito’s responsibilities will consist of little more than giving nasty comments to the media if and when Judge Singhal ever gets around to writing an order dismissing this turkey.
Trump v. Cable News Network [Docket via Court Listener]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.
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