Lawyers for Donald Trump have threatened to sue the Center for American Progress for $5 billion unless the group retracts a report that said National Guard deployments had no measurable impact on violent crime rates. The letter, sent Monday by Trump's personal lawyer Alexander Brito, gave the think tank until 5 p.m. Friday to pull the report and apologize to the president.
The timing gives the dispute immediate weight. The report was released last month and examined National Guard deployments across the country, concluding that the president's decision to send federalized troops into American cities was largely ineffective at a cost of roughly $1.7 billion. A Center for American Progress employee also appeared on C-SPAN earlier this month to discuss the findings, putting the analysis into public view before the legal threat arrived.
That is where the fight turns from politics to process. Trump is threatening a defamation suit over research that the Center for American Progress says rests on crime data and rigorous, evidence-based analysis, not on an attack designed to punish a critic. In a Friday statement, Neera Tanden said the group's work was grounded in rigorous, evidence-based research and analysis, and said the report showed facts about the National Guard deployments that are inconvenient to the Trump administration.
Tanden went further, calling the threatened lawsuit's attack on facts and evidence baseless. She said the First Amendment protects the publication of facts and analysis that run contrary to the claims of any administration, and called the legal threat a transparent attempt to silence the group. “We will neither cower nor bend in the face of it,” she said.
The confrontation fits a familiar pattern. Trump has repeatedly threatened to revoke broadcast licenses for news networks over coverage he dislikes, and he has unsuccessfully sued major news organizations for defamation. He also tried to sue The Des Moines Register over an unfavorable poll before the 2024 election, while Brendan Carr has launched probes into NPR and PBS and revived complaints into ABC, CBS and NBC.
Whether the threat becomes a lawsuit is now the next test. The deadline is Friday at 5 p.m., and the answer will show whether the $5 billion demand was leverage, bluff, or the opening move in another fight over what can be published about Trump's record.
