Trump Renews Pledge to ‘Take a Strong Look’ at Libel Laws
President Trump on Wednesday repeated a pledge to make it easier for people to sue news organizations
and publishers for defamation, denouncing the country’s libel laws as a “sham” a day after his personal lawyer filed a lawsuit against a major media outlet, BuzzFeed News.
“We are going to take a strong look at our country’s libel laws, so
that when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts,” Mr. Trump said during a public portion of a cabinet meeting in the White House.
The president added, “Our current libel laws are a sham and a disgrace and do not represent American values or American fairness.”
First Amendment lawyers were quick to point out that Mr. Trump has little power to
modify those laws, barring a Supreme Court appeal or constitutional amendment.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, filed a defamation lawsuit against BuzzFeed News for publishing, last January, a salacious and mostly unsubstantiated intelligence dossier
that purported to describe how Russia had aided the Trump campaign.
Harder of Harder Mirell & Abrams in Beverly Hills, Calif., sent an 11-page cease-and-desist
letter to the publisher of Mr. Wolff’s book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.”
Mr. Harder’s letter demanded that the publisher, Henry Holt
and Company, withdraw the book from stores and apologize; the publisher responded by moving up the book’s release date and increasing its first print run to one million copies, from 150,000.