Judge tosses Trump’s New York Times defamation suit for being too long

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Transcript

00:00A judge has thrown out the president's defamation lawsuit against the New York Times,

00:05in part because the judge says it's too long.

00:10The judge said in the filing that the suit lacked, quote, any legitimate legal claims.

00:16There must have been various matters in that complaint,

00:21which from the judge's point of view were both inflammatory and irrelevant, and so offended him.

00:27The judge also said the filing violated Rule 8 for this kind of lawsuit.

00:32That requires several things, including complaints be a short and plain statement.

00:38The complaint is this sort of laundry list of, you know, saying nice things about Trump

00:44and making irrelevant claims about, you know, how much he won the election by

00:50and making statements about his dad,

00:54none of which is actually particularly relevant to whatever claim there might be.

01:01The judge will allow the Trump team to refile,

01:04but said they need to cut it from 85 pages to 40 maximum.

01:09It is the kind of response that is appropriate to

01:15lawyers who aren't otherwise showing that they're capable of following the rules.

01:21Trump sued the paper for $15 billion, alleging the Times and Penguin Random House Publishing

01:29trying to damage his reputation before the 2024 election.

01:34They cited several articles and a book from Times reporters called Lucky Loser.

01:40The suit says in part, these publications were created with a backward methodology.

01:45The authors started with a desired narrative for the book and the articles,

01:50and then to achieve that narrative, they falsified, distorted, and manipulated facts.

01:55The president plans to refile.

01:58And then likely the New York Times will file a motion to throw out the lawsuit on grounds of various deficiencies,

02:07and either that will work or not.

02:09If not, then the lawsuit will move to discovery.

02:14And here it's very odd that Trump files these suits because that means he is subject to discovery.

02:21And that means that the New York Times can ask him many, many questions,

02:26get him to turn over many documents, and he's typically quite loathe to do that.

02:30This legal battle comes as Trump's relationship with the media becomes increasingly adversarial,

02:36including his threat to revoke the licenses of networks who he sees as against him.

02:41For Straight Arrow News, I'm Cara Rucker.

02:44For more unbiased, fact-driven news, download the Straight Arrow News mobile app today.