Former President Donald Trump filed a bizarre $10 billion lawsuit Thursday against CBS News — and he took care to file it with a controversial far-right judge whom he appointed, reported The Washington Post.
This follows weeks of threats from the former president to take legal action against the network for giving an interview to Vice President Kamala Harris.
The lawsuit argues that the interview with Harris, which is standard for major party presidential candidates each election cycle, was “deceitful” and “amounts to a brazen attempt to interfere in the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election,” because the network allegedly edited the footage to present Harris in a better light.
CBS called the lawsuit “completely without merit” and added that they “fairly presented the Interview to inform the viewing audience, and not to mislead it.”
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The First Amendment creates a nearly insurmountable bar to suing journalists for editorial decisions, even if Trump proves the interview was manipulated to Harris’ benefit.
Trump declined the network’s offer for an interview, partly over his grievance about how he came off during his 2020 interview with Lesley Stahl.
Despite the long-shot nature of the case, Trump filed it in the Amarillo division of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, guaranteeing the case will be assigned to the sole judge there: Matthew Kacsmaryk, a judge appointed by Trump.
Kacsmaryk, whose court has become a hub for conservative attorneys to engage in the practice known as “judge-shopping,” is best known for trying to block access to the abortion drug mifepristone nationwide, on the lawsuit of a far-right group known as the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine that challenged the FDA’s expertise in the drug’s safety. The Supreme Court — stacked with Trump’s appointees — unanimously overturned it.
