President Donald Trump's legal team made several grave errors in their new $10 billion lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal, NewsCorp and Rupert Murdoch, according to an attorney who specializes in First Amendment law.
In a thread posted to his X account Friday, Atlanta, Georgia-based lawyer Andrew Fleischman predicted that Trump's lawsuit will be promptly thrown out due to multiple glaring issues. Chiefly, Trump filed the lawsuit in federal court in the Southern District of Florida. While he may have done so as a means of drawing U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon — the Trump appointee who officially scuttled former DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith's classified documents case against Trump last July — Fleischman pointed out that Florida has an anti-SLAPP statute [Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation] that will doom Trump's litigation.
Florida's libel and defamation laws also require that plaintiffs give defendants at least five days' notice that they plan to sue them before officially submitting the filing in court. According to Fleischman, Trump "made that impossible" by suing the Journal just a day after the paper published its bombshell report about a lewd birthday message Trump allegedly sent Epstein in 2003.
"The remedy is dismissal," Fleischman tweeted. "And I suspect that means Trump pays the WSJ's legal fees."
"That's not the only big problem with the lawsuit," he continued in a subsequent tweet. "But it's the one that an 11 year old with a Lexis subscription could figure out in 5 minutes."
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