Trump Seeks to Quash E. Jean Carroll's Defamation Suit by Substituting Sue-Proof Uncle Sam as the Defendant

One of the few times Donald Trump has been held accountable is when a jury ruled that he had sexually assaulted columnist E. Jean Carroll and then defamed her by lying about it—and then he did it again, and they hit him with even larger damages. Naturally, Trump is now trying to get the Department of Justice to save him even from this.

Politico reports:

In a Tuesday filing, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Brett Shumate said the government would seek to use the Westfall Act to swap Trump for the U.S. as the defendant in the lawsuit. That would require dismissal of the case because the federal government can’t be sued for defamation. A panel of appeals court judges previously denied the U.S.’s effort to insert itself as the defendant.

The act gives federal employees immunity from some civil damages when they are found to have been acting within the scope of their employment. While Trump was president when he made the comments at issue in Carroll’s lawsuit, it would be highly unusual for the government to intervene on the president’s behalf at this stage, post trial and verdict. …

Carroll’s lawsuits have become some of the last major personal legal burdens dogging Trump through his second term. Though Trump also faced a state criminal conviction and a civil fraud lawsuit in the period between his presidencies, the conviction came with no punishment and an appeals court tossed the half-billion financial penalty imposed on Trump in the civil case, though it upheld the fraud ruling.

Carroll’s lawsuits, for which Trump owes a total of $88.3 million plus interest, concern Carroll’s allegations that he sexually assaulted her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s and then defamed her by denying her account, calling her a liar.

To be clear, Donald Trump and his family have used his position to increase their fortune by billions of dollars since he regained office, of which $80 million is a tiny fraction. This is not about the money. This is about Trump trying to establish that his status as president provides him complete immunity from all accountability.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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