President-elect Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit against the Des Moines Register newspaper and its former top pollster, J. Ann Selzer, for election interference. The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages and an order barring the Des Moines Register from engaging in deceptive and misleading acts related to polling. Trump filed the lawsuit just days after ABC News agreed to settle a defamation case he brought by donating $15 million to his presidential library and publicly apologizing for comments by anchor George Stephanopoulos, who inaccurately said the president-elect had been found liable for rape. Trump’s lawyers cited the ABC deal in a letter to the judge overseeing the president-elect’s copyright lawsuit against Simon & Schuster over audio recordings of an author’s interviews with Trump. Some legal experts believe Trump’s comments and legal actions risk chilling news coverage of the incoming administration, even if legal protections for journalists are for now robust. The ABC settlement was concerning to media and legal experts, who believed ABC had a good chance of beating the case but may have agreed to settle out of fear of retribution from the Trump administration.
