The former president threatens to also sue other media outlets that criticize his election theft scam.
He is claiming $475 million in punitive damages from CNN, alleging that the news channel fears he will run for president in 2024 and wants to defeat him politically prior to that. The former president announced a few weeks ago his intention to sue the channel and to begin legal action against other media outlets that, in his opinion, have defamed and misled the public regarding the “overwhelming evidence of fraud in the 2020 elections″.
He threatens to take to court those who do not subscribe to him. In reality, it is he himself and his collaborators who are being investigated both in the courts and in Congress for their attempts to subvert Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 elections.
In the lawsuit against CNN, filed in a Fort Lauderdale (Florida) court, the former president claims that CNN has carried out a “campaign of defamation and slander” against him. He affirms that the channel has used adjectives to refer to him as “lackey of the Russians”, “insurrectionist” or “racist”.
This last adjective has come up this Monday on the television network, but curiously from Republican Senator Rick Scott, who said this Sunday: “It is never ever right to be racist”. Scott had been asked about former President Donald Trump’s personal attack on Elaine Chao, his former Transportation secretary, and wife of Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Trump’s political enemy. Last Friday, in a post on his social network, Truth Social, Trump tried to ridicule McConnell and Chao, referring to her as the “China-loving wife of Senator Coco Chow!”.
Regardless of that episode, Trump often links immigration directly to crime and refers to the arrival of immigrants as an “invasion,” using a tone and words that have often earned him the label of racist from Democrats and the media.
Trump also accuses the network of comparing him to Hitler. Comparing Trump to “arguably the most heinous figure in modern history” is, according to his lawyers, evidence that CNN acted with malice toward him, which is the requirement for proving defamation against a public figure.
The lawsuit points to several examples allegedly comparing Trump to Hitler, including a special report titled “The Fight to Save Democracy” by CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria that aired on Jan. 9th, 2022, about a year after the Jan. 6th assault on Capitol Hill. “America has beaten demagogues before – how do we do it now?” said Zakaria in a promo for the report, according to excerpts from the lawsuit cited by Bloomberg. Trump alleges the report went too far because “a central point of the report is a discussion of Hitler’s rise and comparisons to the plaintiff, interspersing discussion of Hitler and Nazi Germany with images of the plaintiff,” even though Zakaria also said, “Let’s be very clear. Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler.”
Another lawsuit accusing his 2016 election rival Hillary Clinton and dozens of others of conspiring against him with allegedly false allegations about Russia was dismissed by a Florida judge last month.
TYT Newsroom
