The Trump exception to libel law
By 
The 9th circuit coughed up a terrible ruling yesterday, affirming a district court’s order that Stormy Daniels owes Donald Trump’s lawyers $122,000 in legal fees, because the lawsuit Michael Avenatti filed in 2018 claiming that Trump defamed Daniels by calling her a liar was so meritless it was properly dismissed in a pretrial motion.
Let’s list the ways this is a really bad decision:
(1) The district court held in effect that even though Daniels’s allegations — that Trump knowingly lied when he claimed Daniels was fabricating a story of being threatened by a man who was almost certainly Michael Cohen — had to be treated as true for the purposes of the motion to dismiss the suit, the suit should still be dismissed, because, in effect, everybody knows Trump lies about everything so no harm no foul:
In deciding in favor of the president, U.S. District Judge S. James Otero – who is also overseeing Daniels’ pending lawsuit about her non-disclosure agreement – ruled that Trump’s tweet “constitutes ‘rhetorical hyperbole’ normally associated with politics and public discourse in the United States.”
Otero noted that Daniels had “sought to publicly present herself as an adversary” to Trump, and that to deny him the ability to engage in responding to her allegations “would significantly hamper the office of the President.”
“Any strongly-worded response by a president to another politician or public figure could constitute an action for defamation,” Otero wrote in his opinion. “This would deprive the country of the ‘discourse’ common to the political process.”
This is just nonsense. Trump specifically claimed that Daniels was lying about his minion intimidating her and her toddler daughter in a Las Vegas parking lot. This isn’t “hyperbole:” it’s a statement of (purported) fact, which Trump knew was false at the time he made it. It’s not protected speech, because libel isn’t protected speech. But apparently Donald Trump can’t libel anybody, because he libels all of his opponents all the time with false claims (if you can follow this line of argument, you have what is known as a legal mind.
(2) Daniels also claims, with considerable credibility, that supremely sleazy ex-lawyer crook Michael Avenatti filed the lawsuit without her permission. Given Avenatti’s rampant criminality and dishonesty, sticking Daniels with a six-figure legal bill racked up by Donald Trump’s lawyers as a consequence of Avenatti’s decisions is really outrageous.
(3) Speaking of Donald Trump’s lawyers, look who is racking up those bills while protecting President Fascist’s constitutional right to commit libel (check out the third name in the list of lawyers).