Trump sues Washington Post for libel over opinion piece alleging conspiracy with Russia

(Image credit: NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images)

published 3 March 2020

President Trump said to expect more lawsuits after his campaign sued The New York Times last week, and he didn't disappoint.

Trump's campaign on Tuesday sued The Washington Post for libel over two opinion articles it published last June declaring the campaign had attempted to conspire with Russia to influence the 2016 election. The suit is a concrete example of Trump's longstanding condemnation of the paper and every thing it writes about him, and echoes the exact wording of last week's suit against the Times.

In one of the opinion articles Trump's suit mentions, the Post's Greg Sargent mentions Trump's campaign "tried to conspire with" Russia's "sweeping and systematic" attack on the 2016 election. In the other, the Post's Paul Waldman says the Trump campaign had "invited" Russia and North Korea "to offer their assistance" in influencing the election. Both of these statements, the suit alleges, are "false and defamatory."

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Promising to sue newspapers and cable networks was all but a campaign promise of Trump during and beyond the 2016 election, but last week's Times suit was one of the first times Trump has actually followed through. Trump has likely been resistant before because a suit would open him to a revealing discovery process — something "the Times has to be licking its lips thinking about," The Daily Beast's Harry Siegel tweeted last week.

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Kathryn is a graduate of Syracuse University, with degrees in magazine journalism and information technology, along with hours to earn another degree after working at SU's independent paper The Daily Orange. She's currently recovering from a horse addiction while living in New York City, and likes to share her extremely dry sense of humor on Twitter.

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