Thursday, June 27, 2024, Washington Post Office, Washington, DC, USA.
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Days before the presidential election, former President Donald Trump and his campaign filed a lawsuit against two major media companies, accusing them of illegally supporting Vice President Kamala Harris through their reporting and advertising.
Legal experts called Trump’s efforts frivolous.
The Republican campaign filed on Thursday: Federal Election Commission Complaint The Washington Post accused Harris of making “illegal corporate in-kind contributions.”
This campaign is based on accusations semaphores The report said the Post highlighted a number of articles critical of Trump compared to more neutral coverage of Democratic candidates as part of a ramped-up paid advertising campaign on social media.
The FEC’s complaint alleges that Semaphore’s report shows that the Post is “conducting an underground financial enterprise campaign against President Donald J. Trump.”
Richard Briffault, a professor at Columbia Law School, told CNBC that the claim was “absolutely ridiculous.”
“There is no evidence to suggest that there was any coordination between the Post and the Harris campaign,” said Brifau, who specializes in campaign finance regulation and political law.
He said the paper’s ads “at best” amounted to independent spending protected by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FEC decision, which expanded rules on corporate campaign spending.
“And, as the Trump letter acknowledges, the Post’s actions do not count as independent expenditures because they are not explicitly defending Ms. Harris,” Brifau added.
“This is a press release lawsuit and nothing more serious than that.”
“As part of The Washington Post’s regular social media marketing strategy, posts promoted across social media platforms feature great content across all industries and subjects,” a spokesperson for the newspaper told CNBC in a statement Friday. It reflects that,” he said.
“We believe there are no merits to the allegations suggesting that this routine media practice is inappropriate,” the spokesperson said.
President Trump also filed a federal civil lawsuit against CBS on Thursday, seeking $10 billion in damages over the network’s editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Harris that aired in early October.
The 19-page lawsuit accuses CBS of illegally intervening in the election to help Harris win the election, but that the network aired two different parts of Harris’ answers to the same question. It is based solely on
An excerpt of the interview aired on CBS’s “Face the Nation” shows Harris giving some of her answers.
But “60 Minutes” showed a different part of Harris’ response.
President Trump has repeatedly claimed on social media and at campaign rallies that the editorial move was “the biggest media scandal in the history of broadcasting.”
He called on CBS to revoke its federal broadcast license.
“60 Minutes” on October 20th blamed Trump He accused the show of deceptive editing and called his claims “false.”
“60 Minutes provided excerpts from an interview with Face the Nation in which some of her answers were used longer than on 60 Minutes,” the show said in a statement at the time. “Same question, same answer, but some responses are different.”
CBS In a statement Thursday, he called Trump’s lawsuit “absolutely without merit.”
Constitutional law expert Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School, told CBS that the case was “an outrageous violation of First Amendment principles.”
Rebecca Tushnet, another First Amendment lawyer at Harvard Law School, said: told CNN He said the lawsuit was “ridiculous and frivolous and should be laughed at.”
Trump’s lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Amarillo, Texas, effectively guaranteeing that the case would be assigned to Judge Matthew Kaczmarik, Trump’s presidential candidate and presidential candidate. conservative judicial record.
