American Bar Association censored damning report on Donald Trump's attempts to sue critics

A committee of media lawyers at the American Bar Association (ABA) commissioned a report on Donald Trump's use of libel lawsuits, real and threatened, and veteran First Amendment lawyer and former journalist Susan E. Seager returned with an article titled "Donald J. Trump Is a Libel Bully but Also a Libel Loser." The ABA declined to publish the report in the committee's journal as written, The New York Times reports, and one of its reasons was "the risk of the ABA being sued by Mr. Trump."

Seager studied seven cases in which Trump and his companies filed lawsuits pertaining to free speech; Trump lost four, withdrew two, and in the final case obtained a default judgment in private arbitration after the former beauty contest participant failed to appear in court. "Donald J. Trump is a libel bully," the report begins. "Like most bullies, he's also a loser, to borrow from Trump's vocabulary." But while "journalists and whistleblowers" won in court, it noted, that came "at significant cost of time, energy, and money."

The ABA wanted to change the headline to "Presidential Election Demonstrates Need for Anti-Slapp Laws" and cut the first paragraph calling Trump a "libel bully" and a "loser." In an Oct. 19 email, ABA deputy executive director James Dimos said the changes were needed to address "the legitimately held views of ABA staff who are charged with managing the reputational and financial risk to the association," adding that reducing the likelihood of a lawsuit by "removing inflammatory language" is "the same advice members of the forum would provide to their own clients."

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Lots of First Amendment and media lawyers, including three former chairmen of the ABA's media-law committee, disagreed. "It is more than a little ironic," one former chairman, David J. Bodney, told The New York Times, "that a publication dedicated to the exploration of First Amendment issues is subjected to censorship when it seeks to publish an article about threats to free speech." Seager agreed. "I wanted to alert media lawyers that a lot of these threats are very hollow," she said, adding that the ABA's actions proved her point: "The ABA took out every word that was slightly critical of Donald Trump."

You can read the unchanged report at the Medial Law Resource Center, and learn more about the ABA's stated rationale for seeking those changes — including that it is nonpartisan — at The New York Times.