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A federal judge in Florida has thrown out President Donald Trump’s $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times in a scathing order slamming the litigation as “decidedly improper and impermissible” under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and ordered his attorneys to obey a page limit if they want to re-file the case.
U.S. District Judge Steven D. Merryday, who was named to the federal bench by former President George H.W. Bush, struck the president’s legal complaint from the court’s docket in an order lambasting both Trump and his legal team for having brought it in the first place.
“In this action, a prominent American citizen (perhaps the most prominent American citizen) alleges defamation by a prominent American newspaper publisher (perhaps the most prominent American newspaper publisher) and by several other corporate and natural persons,” he said.
Merryday noted that Trump’s 85-page complaint had alleged “only two simple counts of defamation” while taking a full eighty pages to get to the first count.
The judge’s order also took aim at the poor quality of the writing used in the complaint as he groused about how Trump’s lawyers forced readers to “labor through allegations” replete with unnecessary verbiage such as “a new journalistic low for the hopelessly compromised and tarnished ‘Gray Lady’” and other examples of what he called the “many, often repetitive, and laudatory (toward President Trump) but superfluous allegations” exhibited in the president’s stricken complaint.
He further criticized Trump’s lawyers for not apparently understanding that a legal complaint is neither a “public forum for vituperation and invective” nor a “megaphone for public relations or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally or the functional equivalent of the Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner.”
While he left open the possibility for Trump’s lawyers to re-file their lawsuit, he ordered them to keep their second attempt to under 40 pages and said it must be filed within the next four weeks.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the president’s private attorneys said Trump would “continue to hold the Fake News accountable through this powerhouse lawsuit against the New York Times, its reporters, and Penguin Random House, in accordance with the judge’s direction on logistics.”
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