Trump Suffers Humiliating Third Legal Loss in as Many Hours
Donald Trump is on a string of legal defeats.
The president’s defamation lawsuit against The Guardian collapsed Monday when a Florida judge granted motions to dismiss, crushing its latest attempt to take money from a media institution.
The case was brought in 2023 by Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), the company that owns Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social. They sued the British newspaper for defamation, arguing that it, and a local Florida daily that picked up the story, published false statements about the company’s financial machinations.
In a March 2023 article, The Guardian reported that TMTG accepted “$8 million” in emergency loans from shadowy entities. This included a $2 million loan from Paxum Bank, as well as $6 million from a group known as ES Family Trust. The newspaper also noted at the time that one of ES Family’s directors allegedly had ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
At the time, prosecutors in the Southern District of New York were investigating whether the loans violated federal money laundering laws.
“According to this report, one of TMTG’s executives floated the idea of returning the money given the lack of detail and transparency about who was making the loans. TMTG co-founder Will Wilkerson, who ultimately became a whistleblower in the federal investigation, told SDNY that CFO Phillip Juhan was uncomfortable with the murky nature of the two entities,” the report reported. Internet.
But simply reporting information is not enough to meet the legal prerequisites in a defamation case involving “actual malice” against a public figure.
Judge Hunter W. Carroll of Florida’s Twelfth Judicial Circuit grants anti-SLAPP motion The Guardiana sign that the court interpreted the lawsuit as an unfounded attempt to silence critics.
Instead, The GuardianThe reporting “was based on multiple sources familiar with the investigation, review of TMTG’s internal communications, the investigation into the entities that made the loans, and unsuccessful requests for additional information from the Department of Justice, the investigators’ office and TMTG’s outside counsel,” Carroll wrote in his decision.
This is Trump’s third legal defeat in just a few hours, following another ruling in which a federal judge dropped criminal charges against former FBI Director James Comey (and by extension New York Attorney General Letitia James), ruling that the prosecutor who brought the charges in both cases — Lindsey Halligan — had not been legally appointed.
