Susan Shelley: Donald Trump and the courts

If you stacked up all of Donald Trump’s legal bills since his election in 2016, they’d reach Mars before Elon Musk does.

He’s paying teams of attorneys to defend against the various civil and criminal charges that a majority of voters in seven swing states just dismissed as irrelevant, and he’s suing a bunch of media heavyweights over what he famously calls “Fake News.”

Trump sued ABC, ABC News and anchor George Stephanopolous, who said on his March 10 program that Trump was “found liable for rape.” He wasn’t, and a settlement of the case was just announced.  ABC News agreed to publish a statement of “regret” and make a $15 million donation to help build the Trump Presidential Library. The network also agreed to pay $1 million of Trump’s legal fees.

Every little bit helps.

Trump is suing CBS News for “election and voter interference.” In October, a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris was more favorably edited after promotional excerpts on “Face the Nation” showed Harris giving an incoherent answer to a question about Israel. In the “60 Minutes” broadcast of the interview, a completely different answer to the same question was shown.

The lawsuit says the interview was “deceptively doctored.” Trump seeks a jury trial and $10 billion — yes, billion — in damages. “This action concerns CBS’s partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference through malicious, deceptive, and substantial news distortion calculated to (a) confuse, deceive, and mislead the public, and (b) attempt to tip the scales in favor of the Democratic Party,” the complaint charged.

CBS said the accusation is “false” and claims the Harris interview, like all “60 Minutes” interviews, was edited to be “clear, accurate and on point.” But Trump doesn’t have to take them at their word. The discovery process unleashed by a lawsuit will likely force the network to turn over original transcripts and internal communications to the president-elect.

George Stephanopoulos had been scheduled to answer questions from Trump’s lawyers, under oath, at the time ABC News announced their settlement.

Trump has just filed a lawsuit for “brazen election interference” against Iowa pollster Ann Selzer, the Des Moines Register, and the newspaper’s parent company, Gannett. A poll they published shortly before the Nov. 5 election showed Harris leading Trump in Iowa by a margin of 47-44. That was wildly off from the actual results in the election. Trump won Iowa with 56% of the vote.

The poll was “deceptive and misleading, unfair, and the result of concealment, suppression, and omission of material facts about the true respective positions of President Trump and Harris in the Presidential race, all of which were known to Defendants and should have been disclosed to the public,” the complaint charges. Trump seeks damages and a court order forcing the defendants to disclose internal information about the poll, which allegedly violated an Iowa law against “unfair, deceptive or fraudulent” acts.

The lawsuit points to another poll by Selzer in the 2022 Iowa attorney general race, which showed the Republican candidate trailing the Democrat by 16 points. The Republican won the race by two points. Selzer “has quietly used her polls to try and influence recent races in favor of Democrats,” the lawsuit charges. Polling can affect fundraising and voter turnout.

There have been more defamation lawsuits adding to the legal bills. In January, a New York jury ordered Trump to pay $83 million to E. Jean Carroll for defaming her by ridiculing her department-store rape accusation. Trump’s lawyers fared better against Stormy Daniels, who lost her defamation suit against the former president and was ordered to pay him $300,000 for his legal fees.

In 2022, Trump sued the Pulitzer Prize board for libel after it reaffirmed its 2018 awards to the New York Times and Washington Post for their reporting on alleged Trump-Russia collusion to win the presidency. Multiple investigations proved the stories to be false and to have originated in phony research secretly paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign, which later paid a fine for inaccurately listing the payments in campaign finance reports as “legal expenses.”

Trump demanded to know how the Pulitzer board’s anonymous “independent reviewers” were able to verify the anonymous sources on which the stories were based. In July, a state judge in Florida refused to dismiss the lawsuit, agreeing with Trump that the Pulitzer board’s statement affirming the awards “failed to address” that question.

Then there are the law enforcement cases. Trump is appealing a New York judge’s ruling that he owes a fine of nearly half a billion dollars for overvaluing his real estate holdings to get better loan terms from a bank that wasn’t even complaining.

In another New York case, the now-president-elect was found guilty of 34 counts of recording “hush money” reimbursements to his lawyer as “legal expenses” in his own business records, misdemeanor offenses turned into felonies by a connection to another felony that no one has identified or charged. Sentencing is postponed indefinitely. Judge Juan Merchan rejected Trump’s argument that presidential immunity should have kept some testimony out of the trial. Trump’s lawyers can appeal that ruling.

In Fulton County, Georgia, where Trump and others were charged with racketeering and conspiracy in connection with challenging the 2020 election results, a state appeals court just disqualified District Attorney Fani Willis from prosecuting the case due to her romance with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, who already resigned.

Two federal criminal cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith, one in Washington, D.C., charging conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election and one in Florida accusing Trump of taking “national security information” to Mar-a-Lago, have been dismissed because the Justice Department has a policy against prosecuting a sitting president.

Those cases were nonsense anyway. Joe Biden may soon take national security records out of the White House, because it’s completely legal under the Presidential Records Act of 1978. And as for overturning the results of the 2020 election, the voters just did.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley.com