by Kevin Killough
Lawyers for President Donald Trump are threatening to file a $5 billion defamation lawsuit against a liberal think tank if it doesn’t retract a report claiming that the White House’s deployment of National Guard troops has failed to lower crime rates in D.C. The group is refusing to comply.
The Center for American Progress published a report in July that found the troop deployments failed to reduce urban crime in the way Trump had claimed, the New York Times reported.
Trump’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito, sent a cease and desist letter to the center on Monday, warning that Trump would file the suit if the group didn’t fully retract the report. Briot claims the report was full of malicious and false statements, and he gave the center until 5 p.m. on Friday to retract the report and issue an apology to Trump.
Neera Tanden, CAP president and CEO, said in a statement that the lawsuit is an “attack on facts” and its “evidence is baseless.”
“A fundamental protection of the First Amendment is to allow for the publication of facts and analysis that are contrary to the arguments and claims of any administration. A lawsuit is a transparent attempt to silence us. We will neither cower nor bend in the face of it,” Tanden said.
“A lawsuit is a transparent attempt to silence us. We will neither cower nor bend in the face of it,” she said.
According to Tanden, public policy disagreements in America “are resolved through robust public debate, not through threats or intimidation.”
“Independent data, evidence, and analysis are essential to that debate. Efforts to silence independent research because its findings are unwelcome by an administration or president should alarm every American,” she said.
Tanden called the Center for American Progress an “independent, nonpartisan research organization, and our work is grounded in rigorous, evidence-based research and analysis.”
Washington, D.C.-based CAP was created in 2003 as a Democratic alternative to such conservative think tanks as The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute.
The group’s founder and chairman of the board of directors is John Podesta, who served as a senior adviser to President Joe Biden, counselor to President Barack Obama, co-chair of Obama’s presidential transition team, and White House chief of staff to President Bill Clinton. He also was the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, according to the CAP website.
Tanden also worked in the Clinton administration as an associate director for domestic policy and a senior policy adviser to then-first lady Hillary Clinton. She also served as Biden White House staff secretary and as a domestic policy adviser to President Biden.
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Kevin Killough is a reporter for Just the News. Zachery Schmidt is the digital editor of The Star News Network and contributed to this story.Â
