President Trump has ratcheted up his rhetorical battle over recent US airstrikes in Iran by having an attorney send legal letters to CNN and The New York Times demanding retractions of accurate reports.
On Thursday evening a CNN spokesperson confirmed that the network responded to the letter by rejecting the claims in it.
The Times publicized its response, which said in part, “No retraction is needed. No apology will be forthcoming. We told the truth to the best of our ability. We will continue to do so.”
Trump has a long history of litigation in his business career, and an even longer history of threatening to sue and not following through.
In the past year, Trump has stepped up a legal campaign against major media outlets including CBS, leading some First Amendment experts to decry his use of legal threats and lawsuits to tie up and intimidate newsrooms.
This week’s legal letter from Alejandro Brito, one of Trump’s personal attorneys, alleged that June 24 stories by CNN and The Times were false and defamatory.
The stories described an early US intelligence assessment of the strikes that was at odds with Trump’s insistence that Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites were “completely and totally obliterated.”
Administration officials confirmed the existence of the intel but claimed the assessment was of low confidence and asserted that it was leaked to undercut the president.
Several officials have vowed to conduct leak investigations, and Trump has said any the leakers “should be prosecuted.”
Trump also responded by attacking CNN and The Times in highly personal terms. On Wednesday, when he called for one of three CNN reporters who broke the initial story to be fired, CNN said “we stand 100% behind Natasha Bertrand’s journalism and specifically her and her colleagues’ reporting” about the intelligence assessment.
CNN noted that its coverage of the matter accurately characterized the findings, “which are in the public interest.”
The Times’ lead newsroom lawyer, David E. McCraw, made some similar points in his response to Brito on Thursday.
“The American public has a right to know whether the attack on Iran — funded by taxpayer dollars and of enormous consequence to every citizen — was a success,” McCraw wrote. “We rely on our intelligence services to provide the kind of impartial assessment that we all need in a democracy to judge our country’s foreign policy and the quality of our leaders’ decisions.”
Therefore, he wrote, “it would be irresponsible for a news organization to suppress that information and deny the public the right to hear it. And it would be even more irresponsible for a president to use the threat of libel litigation to try to silence a publication that dared to report that the trained, professional, and patriotic intelligence experts employed by the U.S. government thought that the President may have gotten it wrong in his initial remarks to the country.”
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