WELL, THERE IT IS. A federal judge has taken the broom to another one of the president’s legal dustups, sweeping it clean out the door.
Judge Darrin Gayles down in Florida, a man who appears to know a tall tale when he sees one, looked at Donald Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal and found it wanting.
He said the president had not “plausibly alleged” that the newspaper acted with “actual malice,” which is the high bar a public figure has to clear when they want to sue their way to a victory they couldn’t get at the ballot box or the bargaining table.
The whole fuss was over a July article, one that described a particularly unseemly birthday greeting the former president allegedly sent to his old pal Jeffrey Epstein, a man whose idea of a good time landed him in the history books as a monster.
The article spoke of a drawing of a naked woman and a note about secrets.
Meanwhile, the machinery of American justice is still breaking the law by keeping three million pages of those Epstein files under we wraps despite the December deadline for their release.
Trump, never one to let the truth get in the way of a good tantrum, declared the birthday card was a “fake thing,” claiming he doesn’t draw pictures of women.
He sued the publisher, the parent company, the founder, the chief executive, and two reporters. He wanted ten billion dollars. That’s a lot of money for a man who claims to be a billionaire, but it seems even kings want more straw for their golden crowns.
Now here’s the part that would make a possum laugh if it weren’t so sad. Judge Gayles pointed out that The Journal actually did something old-fashioned: they called Trump before they printed the story.
They asked him for his side. And then they told their readers he denied the whole thing. That’s not malice. That’s not recklessness. That’s called doing your job, and the judge saw it for what it was. He dismissed the case without prejudice, which is a polite legal way of saying “go home, try again, but don’t expect a different answer.”
The president’s legal team called this a “powerhouse lawsuit” and promised to refile it. You can almost hear the sad trombone playing in the background.
This is the same old story, the same tired act. He’s been down this road before, suing The New York Times, CNN, the Des Moines Register. He’s like a fellow who keeps trying to nail smoke to the wall and then gets sore when the hammer hits his thumb.
A $15 billion suit against the New York Times was tossed out last September. He refiled that one, too.
It seems the only thing getting actual exercise these days is the copy-paste function on his lawyers’ computers.
The Wall Street Journal, for its part, stood by its reporting. They said they were pleased, which is the polite way of saying they never lost a minute’s sleep.
The judge agreed with them, noting that a birthday book containing the very letter in question was later released to Congress. The truth has a funny way of sticking around, even when powerful folks wish it would just go take a long walk off a short pier.
So the lesson here, and it bears repeating for folks in the cheap seats and the executive suites alike, is that calling the press liars doesn’t make it so.
If only someone would prosecute Trump and his lawyers for perjury, since the certification of denials is clearly a lie. Trump’s signature is recognizable.
The ‘secrets’ he shared with Epstein might have included the rape of a 13-year-old girl or something still buried in the three million pages that have not been released from the Epstein files. Who knew that they had such confidences except for Trump and his best friend?
Suing them doesn’t make the story go away. It just makes the courthouse a little more crowded and the former president’s wallet a little lighter. You can’t bully the truth into hiding, no matter how many lawyers you throw at it. And that’s the way it is.