The Justice Department's Civil Division told a federal appellate court Monday night that it will continue to try and defend former President Donald Trump in a libel suit brought by E. Jean Carroll, a journalist who said Trump raped her in a department store dressing room I the 1990s. After Carroll accused Trump of rape, Trump called her a liar and said, untruthfully, that he had never even met her. Carroll sued Trump for defamation in 2019, and Attorney General William Barr stepped in last September, controversially attempting to have the Justice Department replace Trump in the lawsuit, effectively killing the litigation.
A federal judge in Manhattan, Lewis Kaplan, rejected Barr's move, writing that the law he tried to use doesn't apply because Trump wasn't a government "employee" under the statute and wasn't acting "within the scope of his employment" when he allegedly defamed Carroll. "To conclude otherwise would require the Court to adopt a view that virtually everything the president does is within the public interest by virtue of his office," Kaplan wrote.
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