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President Donald Trump’s campaign on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against the New York Times Co. over an opinion article that accused his 2016 campaign of having “an overarching deal” with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his associates.
“The statements were and are 100 percent false and defamatory. The complaint alleges The Times was aware of the falsity at the time it published them, but did so for the intentional purpose of hurting the campaign, while misleading its own readers in the process,” said a senior legal adviser for Trump’s campaign, Jenna Ellis, in a statement.
In the libel suit, filed in New York, Trump’s lawyers say the newspaper’s “own previous reporting had confirmed the falsity of these statements,” but the paper “published these statements anyway,” in part “because of The Times’ extreme bias against and animosity toward the Campaign, and The Times’ exuberance to improperly influence the presidential election in November 2020.”
The article, published by the New York Times NYT, +0.27% in March 2019, claimed that there was “no need for detailed electoral collusion between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin’s oligarchy because they had an overarching deal: the quid of help in the campaign against Hillary Clinton for the quo of a new pro-Russian foreign policy.”
The Trump campaign’s suit says it’s seeking “compensatory damages in the millions of dollars,” as well as punitive damages and other relief.
A New York Times spokesperson offered the following response to the lawsuit: “The Trump Campaign has turned to the courts to try to punish an opinion writer for having an opinion they find unacceptable. Fortunately, the law protects the right of Americans to express their judgments and conclusions, especially about events of public importance. We look forward to vindicating that right in this case.”
