Trump's litigation extortion machine
You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride.
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Another day, another Trump trollsuit bites the dust.
This time it was his $10 billion defamation claim against the Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch for an article describing a “bawdy” drawing he penned — allegedly! — for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003.
Just one day after the story was published, Trump’s lawyer Alejandro Brito filed suit in Florida alleging “overwhelming financial and reputational damages to President Trump, expected to be in the billions of dollars” and claiming that reporters Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo “concocted this story to malign President Trump’s character and integrity and deceptively portray him in a false light.” Two months later, the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the birthday book compiled by Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, with an image that matched the reporters’ description exactly.
On Monday, a federal judge in Miami finally dismissed the case for failure to satisfy even the most basic requirements of federal pleading.
“The Complaint comes nowhere close to this standard,” wrote Judge Darrin Gayles. “Quite the opposite.”
This is not an isolated outcome. The world’s most famous vexatious litigant regularly spams courts demanding an eleven-figure payout. In addition to the Journal, he’s currently suing the New York Times, the BBC, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, the IRS, Bob Woodward and his publisher Simon and Schuster, the Pulitzer Prize Board, and (through his media company) the Washington Post. Previous targets include Hillary Clinton, CNN, ABC, the New York Times (again), the Washington Post (also again), CBS, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and E. Jean Carroll.
The complaints are various flavors of garbage. They lob accusations instead of facts, demand billions without identifying a single dollar of actual loss, and make their most serious allegations “upon information and belief” — the legal equivalent of “trust me, bro.” No court or jury has ever blessed these claims. In fact, Trump has been sanctioned multiple times for filing patently ridiculous lawsuits.
In 2023, a federal judge fined Trump nearly $1 million for a frivolous RICO suit against Hillary Clinton, James Comey, and half the Democrats in DC. Judge Donald Middlebrooks described the Trump litigation playbook: “Provocative and boastful rhetoric; a political narrative carried over from rallies; attacks on political opponents and the news media; disregard for legal principles and precedent; and fundraising and payments to lawyers from political action committees.”
With Trump back in the White House, the focus appears to be more on leveraging the power of the presidency to extort settlements rather than rallying the base. But he’s still tapping donor cash to fund his litigation. Trump’s Save America leadership PAC paid Brito PLLC nearly $300,000 in 2025 alone, logged as “legal consulting.” Brito’s firm also picked up $1 million in fees from the settlement with ABC.
This makes filing lawsuits effectively costless for Trump, at least initially. Not so for his enemies, who are forced to spend hundreds of thousands on lawyers, schlep down to Florida, and endure months of stress and uncertainty. And that is the entire point of this exercise.
Mugging Murdoch
Trump’s complaint against the Journal was classic Brito: indignant howls of grievous injury coupled with an exorbitant demand for cash, bolstered by the most cursory shrug in the direction of facts or cognizable legal argument.
To prove defamation, a plaintiff must show that the statement was: (1) published, (2) false, (3) harmful, and (4) made with negligence as to the veracity of the claim. Public figures have an additional burden to demonstrate “actual malice,” establishing that the defendant either knew the statement was false or spoke with reckless disregard for the truth. And federal pleadings must allege specific facts to support their legal claims.
Trump simply declared without elaborating that “Defendants possessed information and had access to information that showed their statements were false,” adding that “the statements were published by Defendants with actual malice, oppression and fraud in that they were aware at the time of the falsity of the publication and thus, made said publications in bad faith, out of disdain and ill-will directed towards Plaintiff without any regard for the truth.”
That’s both conclusory and sloppy as hell, conflating colloquial malice — you hate me — with actual malice under the law. Trump alleged zero lost income as a result of the story to substantiate his gargantuan damage demand.
The complaint was dismissed, albeit without prejudice, giving Trump until April 27 to take another swing at it. The Journal is out hundreds of thousands of legal fees, and, assuming Brito tries again, it’s only halfway through this dog of a case. And that’s front of a neutral jurist! When Trump lands one of his own appointees, he can really drag out proceedings to bleed his enemies.
Meet Judge Altman
If Judge Gayles, an Obama appointee, represents the ceiling for expeditiously disposing of a bad Trump lawsuit, Trump’s appointee Roy Altman represents something closer to the floor.
Judge Altman is presiding over Trump’s $10 billion defamation suit against the BBC, as well as the Trump Organization’s suit against Capital One over the closure of hundreds of bank accounts in 2021.
The BBC case involves an inappropriately edited documentary which spliced together sections of Trump’s January 6 speech on the Ellipse to imply that he exhorted his supporters to commit violence. The complaint suffers the same defects as all the others, raging inchoately about “a false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction of President Trump” and alleging “specific, extensive economic harms resulted from these defamatory statements,” without actually pointing to a single dollar lost.
The case fails at the first hurdle, since BBC is a UK company that does not regularly conduct business in Florida. It also fails at the second hurdle, since the documentary in question never aired in the United States. If nobody in Florida saw the documentary, there’s nothing to litigate in a Florida court.
Brito blithely insists that Floridians with VPNs “must” have pirated BBC iPlayer and watched it anyway, therefore publication in Florida should be assumed. As evidence, the complaint cites a surge in Florida VPN usage in early 2025. Brito neglects to mention that said surge coincided with an age-verification law for adult websites that took effect that January 2025, implying instead that Floridians were simply horny for BBC documentaries.
The BBC requested to delay discovery until after its motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction was decided. Judge Altman refused, and even extended discovery into June, allowing Brito to run up BBC’s legal fees for this doomed endeavor.
The Capital One case follows the same pattern. The bank closed hundreds of Trump-affiliated accounts in March 2021, seven weeks after he attempted to overthrow the government. Trump filed suit nearly four years later, alleging the closures were politically motivated, and thus the banks’ marketing materials claiming that it did not discriminate represented a form of consumer fraud. The complaint offers zero specific facts in support of this theory, just a conclusory assertion “upon information and belief” that Capital One was acting on “woke beliefs.”
Judge Altman granted Capital One’s motion to dismiss, which would normally end the matter. Instead the judge permitted 90 days of pre-complaint discovery, telling Brito from the bench that he’d done “just enough” to allege political animus, but needed to “beef up” the allegations before refiling. Granting discovery before a viable complaint exists is frankly bizarre, and will only prolong a case which cannot possibly succeed.
But it will force Capital One to keep the meter running with its lawyers, and that’s a win for Trump. In fact, it’s the only win for Trump, who will never take any of these cases to trial.
Bleeding ‘em
In 2023, Brito filed suit against Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen, alleging breach of contract and attorney-client privilege. Four days before Trump was scheduled to be deposed, he simply dropped the case without explanation.
Just this week, Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, quietly withdrew its defamation suit against The Guardian. The paper reported in 2023 that federal prosecutors were examining $8 million in payments TMTG received from Caribbean-routed entities tied to a Putin ally. A spokesperson vows that the case would be refiled, which is exactly what the Trump PR goons said when they walked away from the Cohen suit.
In reality, Trump stays in these cases for exactly as long as he can annoy his adversaries on the cheap. But a plaintiff claiming $10 billion in reputational and economic damages from a story about an Epstein birthday card has to actually produce evidence of $10 billion in damages. He has to sit for depositions and explain under oath how the story cost him money. He has to open his financial records to scrutiny. For a man whose entire brand is built on the illusion of incomprehensible wealth, that is an existential threat. And so, the minute he has to do more than bleed his enemies, Trump executes the inevitable TACO trade.
These trollsuits aren’t designed to win. They’re designed to extort the targets into a settlement, or at the very least subject them to months of expensive, unpleasant litigation that will make them think twice before they publish that story, or refuse to do business with him. And every month of litigation is another month of legal bills for the defendant, another month of uncertainty, another line item that any reporter or editor or banker has to weigh before doing something Trump doesn’t like. The Journal has been litigating for nine months and the case was just dismissed without prejudice. The BBC is heading into its second summer of proceedings over a documentary that was never even broadcast here. Capital One is mired in discovery before there is even a viable complaint to answer.
Trump will never win these cases, and he doesn’t care. They’re a tool to bludgeon his enemies and chill free speech, and they’re supercharged now that he’s back in the White House.
“I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more,” he gloated in 2009 after losing a defamation case against the journalist Tim O’Brien. “I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.”
That’s it for today
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Another valid charge for impeachment. Corrupt abuse of the justice system for personal gain. Not that there's anynshortage of material.
Minor point, but Brito’s VPN argument to show the BBC video was “published” in FL: it’s actually not easy to use IPlayer with a VPN. I’ve tried it a few times and it seems to know you’re using a VPN even when you set it to a UK location. So that argument was doubly stupid.