Trump sues CNN for defamation

The 76-year-old Republican also said his team “may bring appropriate action against” the congressional committee currently investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by his supporters, saying the panel refused to probe “the massive Presidential Election Fraud” which he insists occurred.

Trump, who requested a jury trial, had a caustic relationship with the CNN and other major news outlets like The New York Times during his term, branding them “fake news” and repeatedly raging against them on social media.

The former president, who has hinted repeatedly at another White House run, accused the CNN in the lawsuit of involvement in a “concerted effort to tilt the political balance to the Left.”

He said the CNN has tried to “taint” him with a “series of ever-more scandalous, false, and defamatory labels of ‘racist,’ ‘Russian lackey,’ ‘insurrectionist,’ and ultimately ‘Hitler.’”

In a July statement, Trump had threatened to sue the CNN if the network refused to retract allegedly defamatory statements made about him.

The lawsuit contained excerpts from CNN’s response to Trump in which it stood by its reporting and declined to make any retractions.

In Monday’s filing, Trump took particular issue with the CNN describing his claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” by Democrat Joe Biden as the “Big Lie.”

“The ‘Big Lie’ is a direct reference to a tactic employed by Adolf Hitler and appearing in Hitler’s Mein Kampf,” the complaint said. “The phrase is not taken lightly and is not bandied about blithely.”

The repeated use of the ‘Big Lie,’ it added, is a “deliberate effort by CNN to propagate to its audience an association between the plaintiff and one of the most repugnant figures in modern history.”

It said the term the ‘Big Lie’ has been used in reference to Trump more than 7,700 times on the CNN since January 2021.

Trump said he filed the suit to “vindicate his reputation as a dedicated public servant and to establish CNN’s liability for the harm it has caused to his reputation by the false, defamatory, and inflammatory mischaracterizations of him.”