Trump: Too busy to be a defendant but plenty of time to sue​

By Tom Hals

WILMINGTON, Delaware, Feb 13 (Reuters) – Soon after winning reelection in November 2024, Donald Trump’s lawyers told a state judge in Delaware that a lawsuit brought against him by two co-founders of his social media company should be put on hold because a sitting president does not have time to deal with civil litigation.

Trump’s lawyers asked the judge, Lori Will, to “recognize a rule of temporary immunity that protects the Presidency from the diversions, distractions and harassment of state civil litigation.” The plaintiffs alleged that they were denied their agreed-upon payout for successfully launching Truth Social.

But before the judge could decide the immunity matter, Trump seemed to undercut his own argument by filing a civil lawsuit of his own against an Iowa newspaper, the Des Moines Register. 

Trump, who for decades has used litigation to hit back at critics, subsequently filed at least five more lawsuits in his personal capacity, seeking tens of billions of dollars. 

These were defamation suits targeting a book publisher, Penguin Random House, and three news organizations, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the BBC; a suit accusing a bank, JPMorgan Chase, of unlawfully closing his accounts; and a suit accusing the U.S. Internal Revenue Service of unlawfully failing to prevent disclosure of his tax returns to the media. 

The media companies and JPMorgan denied wrongdoing. The IRS has not commented on the lawsuit or responded in court.

Ultimately, the Delaware case against Trump was dismissed by Will in September, but not on immunity grounds.

USING TRUMP’S ARGUMENT AGAINST HIM

Some targets of his litigation are trying to use the Republican president’s immunity claim against him, saying if Trump asserts he is too busy to be burdened by responding to litigation brought against him, he should not be allowed to bring lawsuits against others. 

“It’s like saying, ‘We’re going to play baseball and only I get to bat,'” University of Michigan School of Law professor Richard Primus said of Trump’s stance on immunity.

The U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on presidential immunity from civil litigation in a 1997 ruling involving Democratic then-President Bill Clinton, declaring they are not immune. The justices let a defamation and sexual harassment lawsuit by a former Arkansas state employee named Paula Jones proceed against Clinton. 

The Supreme Court in a 2024 ruling involving Trump found that presidents do have broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official actions taken in office, though that decision did not involve civil litigation.

The latest party in one of the Trump lawsuits to refashion his immunity claim against him is pollster Ann Selzer, who he sued along with the Des Moines Register and its publishers in December 2024 over a preelection poll that had shown his Democratic rival Kamala Harris leading in Iowa, a state that Trump ultimately won.

Selzer sought, unsuccessfully, to have the case put on hold for the duration of Trump’s presidency. 

Lawyers for the defendants argued that Trump has a history of misusing the courts for his political agenda, and his immunity claim could give him a new weapon to deploy against the media. Trump could demand private documents and testimony, known as discovery, from the defendants in cases he has filed, but then claim immunity when demands are made on him, they said. 

“You would have had one-sided discovery, a unilateral investigation of the press,” the Des Moines Register’s lawyer, Nick Klinefeldt, told Iowa state court Judge Scott Beattie at a January 30 hearing.

The judge acknowledged the limits of his authority to force the president to comply with any judicial order.

“I can issue a fine of $500 per offense and maybe order some jail time of six months,” Beattie said. “But I am fairly certain there’s going to be pushback about that.” 

Alan Ostergren, Trump’s attorney, said at the hearing the president intends to comply with any orders Beattie issues and that the judge could dismiss Trump’s lawsuit if he does not.

Beattie on Tuesday denied Selzer’s request to put Trump’s lawsuit on hold. 

‘SMEARED AND WRONGED’

Trump’s legal team said in a statement to Reuters that immunity is vital to the presidency, arguing that it is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and supported by legal precedent. 

“Further, President Trump, on behalf of, and together with, all Americans, has an inherent Constitutional right to hold those who have smeared and wronged him accountable. Contrary to the wishes of radical liberals and their cohorts in the media, Presidents do not relinquish that right upon taking the oath of office,” the Trump team said.

So far, courts have sided with Trump.

He was dismissed as a defendant in the lawsuits involving his social media company filed in state courts in Delaware and Florida, although those courts did not address the immunity question in their decisions.

In addition to the ruling by the Iowa judge, an appellate court in Florida rejected a similar request to put on hold a defamation suit Trump filed in 2022 against the Pulitzer Prize Board. He sued after the board rejected his request to rescind a prize awarded jointly to the Washington Post and New York Times in 2018 for their coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 election and connections to his campaign.

If Trump does not have the time to devote to his Pulitzer lawsuit, he is free to dismiss the case himself, a step he could not take as a defendant in litigation, that appellate court said. 

“Donald Trump is a vexatious litigant,” Primus said, and the presidency makes his lawsuits extremely coercive to the defendants he targets. “If he has a legitimate legal claim for something, he could file a suit and ask the court to stay proceedings until he’s out of office. It’s not like he needs the money sooner.”

(Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Will Dunham)