Litigation and Leverage: Trump's Legal Encounters

Donald Trump has sued the Wall Street Journal over its story saying he wrote a weird poem to Jeffrey Epstein and drew a caricature of a naked woman with his own signature as her pubic hair as part of a book wishing a happy 50th birthday to the New York financier. Ken and Josh discuss the suit, which looks more like an exclamation point on his claims that he never even liked that Epstein guy! than a serious effort to win damages from (or extort) the Rupert Murdoch empire. Meanwhile, Trump is seeking the release of grand jury testimony from the investigations into Epstein and his henchwoman Ghislaine Maxwell — a release that wouldn’t be likely to include any books of ribald poetry.

Also this week: Trump’s lawsuit against Bob Woodward and Simon & Schuster — claiming that Woodward and S&S violated Trump’s copyright by publishing the audio of interviews Trump thought were only for use in a written book — has been dismissed; Trump is facing difficulty with another novel application of IEEPA — this time, not tariffs, but an effort to sanction the International Criminal Court, there’s a certified class in the birthright citizenship litigation; a federal judge in California says ICE can’t pick people up just because they look Mexican; and some government immigration lawyers have started appearing anonymously in immigration court; an extra-bizarre civil RICO suit against Eric Adams and the NYPD, from Adams’s own ex-interim NYPD commissioner; Douglass Mackey, a.k.a. “Ricky Vaughn,” has won an appeal of his conviction for trying to trick Hillary Clinton voters into “voting” by text.

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