Trump Files Libel Lawsuit Over New WSJ Report

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0:41They're basically the baby gates of insurance. Get a quote at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states. Welcome to The Beat. I'm Antonia Hilton in tonight for Ari Melber. We start with multiple breaking news developments on Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. Late today, Donald Trump filing a libel suit against the Wall Street Journal over its new Epstein reporting. Also late today, Trump's DOJ filing a motion to unseal grand jury testimony about Epstein. Trump's new suit names Rupert Murdoch, the journal's parent company, and the two reporters who broke that story.

1:19The journal detailing a 2003 letter that Trump reportedly wrote to Epstein for his 50th birthday. The journal describes the letter as, quote, body. It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. In the message, Trump reportedly imagines a conversation with Epstein. Quote, Donald, we have certain things in common, Jeffrey. Jeffrey, yes, we do come to think of it. Donald, enigmas never age. Have you noticed that? And it ends with the line, Donald, a pal is a wonderful thing. Happy birthday and may every day be another wonderful secret.

2:02Trump denies the story. Quote, this is not me. This is a fake thing. It's a fake Wall Street Journal story. I never wrote a picture in my life. I don't draw pictures of women. As for Trump's Attorney General, Pam Bondi, late today, she filed a motion to unseal grand jury transcripts. But the process could take weeks. And as The Post reports, even if released, the material would constitute only a fraction of the evidence and investigative material that the FBI amassed during its years-long investigation. Critics pointing out it looks like Trump is trying to stall and dodge rather than actually reveal critical information.

2:44Greg Sargent in the New Republic writing, quote, Trump's only way out of this is to seek full release of the Epstein files. But he won't. And he can't explain why he won't. The more he calls for meaningless releases that don't provide real transparency, the more he will stoke conspiracism and the more he'll appear in on the elite cover up. Trump today getting hit with more questions. Mr. President, why not go further than just unfeeling? Mr. President, did you come back to the profile?

3:20Christy Greenberg, MSNBC legal analyst and former deputy chief of criminal division for the Southern District of New York, and Lisa Rubin, MSNBC legal correspondent, join us tonight here at the table. Thank you both for being here. Christy, I want to start with you in this lawsuit. Trump going after Rupert Murdoch, the reporters behind this story, filed in Florida in the district where a judge named Eileen Cannon just so happens to be. I'm curious what you think is going on here and if he really has a shot at being successful in going after this story. Well, if he's before Judge Cannon, he's got a shot.

4:01But putting that aside, I mean, look, the Wall Street Journal knew this was going to happen. There had been communications days before this story broke where he was threatening to sue. So this can't be a surprise to anybody that he managed to follow through with it. Whether or not he has a leg to stand on, I think they wouldn't have published this story if they didn't feel very confident. And, you know, he has to show that they they knew that this was false, that this was going to be defamatory. I believe it's a libel lawsuit. And they must feel like they are on very solid footing as to where they got this letter, what their sourcing was, and that they reported it accurately.

4:38So given all of that, I think he's unlikely to succeed unless he happens to get a good draw with good old Judge Cannon. Lisa, is there any chance here that a lawsuit could actually backfire on Trump in this case? It could. And the way that it would backfire on him, Antonia, is through the discovery process. Because as you know, if a case were to survive a motion to dismiss, then the parties begin to exchange information that helps them prove either their claims or their defenses. As the plaintiff in this lawsuit, Donald Trump would have to sit for a deposition. And as an observer of prior Trump litigation, including both of the E.G.

5:19Carroll trials, I can tell you that where Donald Trump has an opportunity to defend himself, he is always his worst enemy. He literally buried himself in the E. Jean Carroll trial through his deposition there. That's where he mistook a picture of E. Jean for his then wife, Marla Maples. It's also where he doubled down on the Access Hollywood tape and said that he considered himself a star. In other words, yes, when he said that stars could do certain things, he was absolutely talking about himself and describing his own modus operandi. Those were things that juries, two juries of his New York peers held against him in the E.G.

5:57Carroll case, if his defamation case were to go that far, Donald Trump would have to sit for a deposition, exchange materials. But of course, Donald Trump is counting, Antonia, on it never going that far. Because in the two lawsuits that he's filed to gate against other media organizations, he has extracted settlements from them well before those things could ever happen. So you think his hope here is basically that the Wall Street Journal's parent company is like, we want this to go away and we'll pay for it to get out of our face. Yes. I mean, I think the Wall Street Journal's parent companies will first try what I suggested, which is to move to dismiss on legal grounds to say that whatever Donald Trump's complaint says against them doesn't even meet the legal framework for a defamation claim.

6:41Now, we haven't seen that complaint yet. It hasn't been filed. If your viewers or you have noticed me like typing away at my computer, it's because I'm trying to find that complaint as soon as it's publicly available. All we know is that a docket has been created, meaning a case has been created online, that he has sued five entities or individuals, and that the case is described online as being a defamation case. Beyond that, we don't even know who represents Donald Trump right now. On the docket, he's described as pro se, which is the legal term for someone who represents themselves. Clearly, Donald Trump is not representing himself in this case.

7:17So there's a lot we still have to learn about Donald Trump's defamation case against the Wall Street Journal, its reporters, and Rupert Murdoch. But by naming Murdoch himself as a defendant, I think that's sign number one that he's hoping for a settlement. So a lot still to come there. But then, Christy, on this effort to unseal the grand jury testimony going through your former workplace, can you break that down for us? And how likely is it that those documents, all that testimony, will actually see the light of day? It's unlikely that those grand jury transcripts will see the light of day. The reason why is you have to.

7:54Grand jury proceedings are in secret. Those are the rules. You have to have a reason to be able to say why it shouldn't be secret. Some kind of law enforcement reason, an ongoing case. You're helping other kinds of law enforcement agencies. Right here. The interest is public is interested and the public could be interested in a lot of different cases. That's not alone enough to get a judge to unseal grand jury transcripts. So I don't think they will succeed here. Where they may succeed is getting some of the information that had already come out of trial, information that's already been public in other areas.

8:29Or if certain people whose testimony is in those transcripts, if they would agree and not put up a fight to it. But I mean, the other thing to take a step back, even if any of this were to be public, this is grand jury testimony where the prosecutors went in and said, here's our evidence against Epstein. Here's our evidence against Maxwell, not against Donald Trump. I would be shocked if you saw Donald Trump's name anywhere in these transcripts. Remember, A.G. Barr was the attorney general at that point. Even listing Donald Trump as individual one in that indictment was a huge battle. There's no way he's getting dragged into Epstein and Maxwell grand jury presentations.

9:11So he's not a part of this and he knows that. So even if he were to lose with the judge and this gets unsealed, he's fine. It's not implicating him. And it's not really, I think, going to implicate anybody else because that wasn't the point of those presentations. There weren't other targets there that they were looking to indict. So the base's interest in a client list and finding out all these other people who they believe may be culpable, that's not what you would see in this transcript. So this is a red herring. This is a way for him to distract from the evidence people are actually interested in, which are the notes from interviews of these various witnesses that they looked at in this investigation.

9:52And that he doesn't need a court order to turn over. He could turn that over on his own. The fact that they haven't, that's the question people should be asking. Lisa, do you see this as a red herring, as a distraction? I mean, do you think people will be able to understand all of what she's just laid out here, that this is just a fraction of what's out there and that there's other information the federal government has that it sounds like we still will not see? Are people, given the way this story has gone and this fire has just continued to spread, do you think people are going to be on to what she's just laid out there?

10:23Well, I think our viewers will, but the larger populace that is calling for the release of these files, I'm not sure that they will because they'll see this as a sign that Donald Trump is trying to be more transparent and trying to let the information be free. But for this terrible federal judge, you know, there's a judge in the Southern District who oversaw the Epstein case, who I know, as we sit here tonight, is maybe days away from being demonized by this White House as just another radical, liberal, Donald Trump-hating judge who didn't want to let the administration educate the public about the Epstein files.

11:01It plays, Antonia, right into their narrative about judges and the press, as well as into Donald Trump's efforts to protect himself and inoculate himself from the growth of this story. So I have to ask you both quickly. Senator Dick Durbin published a letter today. He said his office was told that FBI agents were instructed to flag any records in which President Trump was mentioned. Is that normal? What does that signal to the two of you? signals he's running the show, right? Like he's this. In the past, pre Donald Trump, you had an attorney general who was independent and who ran investigations because they were in the best interest of the public and the people here.

11:46If you're looking for any mention of Donald Trump, why is that? It's clearly to protect Donald Trump, to protect his interests, not because the public may have an interest in knowing that information. And so there has been a lot of questions about this decision, this 180, where, you know, you go from February where there's a press conference and we're the most transparent administration in history. You go from that to now you're not getting anything. What is the reason for that? How was the decision made? We got a two-page memo that said a whole lot of nothing. And nobody is really being clear.

12:21It was an unsigned memo. We don't know who made these decisions. And this says to me, Donald Trump is the one directing the show. Christy Greenberg, Lisa Rubin, thank you both so much. Always great to be with you. Coming up in just 90 seconds, we'll talk to the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, Jelani Cobb, about the new Trump lawsuit and his war against the free press. Trump's allies in Congress now also gutting NPR and PBS in a vote taken in the dead of night. NPR's Steve Inskeep is here on that and what public radio will do next for listeners like you. And finally, the shocking end to Stephen Colbert on late night.

12:59Was it due to political pressure? We tracked down tape from the show premiere to find his very first joke about Donald Trump. Later, after that, I'll talk to presidential candidate Jeb Bush. Yeah. As many of you know, of course, Governor Bush was the governor of Florida for eight years. And you would think that that much exposure to oranges and crazy people would have prepared him for Donald Trump. Evidently not.

13:30And we're back with breaking news on Trump and Epstein. Late today, Trump filing a libel lawsuit over the Wall Street Journal's bombshell reporting about his relationship with Epstein. This is just the latest media organization he's attacked in the courts for reporting stories that he doesn't like. Also late today, Trump's attorney general filing a motion seeking the release of grand jury testimony. For Trump, politically, the big question is whether any of this will subdue the MAGA rebellion that's been going on for nearly two weeks now. How many of you are not satisfied with the results of the investigation?

14:10Epstein is a key that picks the lock on so many things. Who went to Epstein Islands? Who specifically went on the plane? Who stayed for more than a night? We're getting flooded with thousands, hundreds of thousands of comments that are very unhappy about this. This is the ultimate betrayal, Carl. There's been a lot of discussion about the Epstein files and the president's comments yesterday calling it a hoax. Can you clarify which part of the Epstein hoax is the hoax? I will not rest until we go full Jan 6 committee on the Jeffrey Epstein files. I think the time has come for the administration to release all of the files.

14:49And joining me now is Jelani Cobb, Dean of the Columbia Journalism School, staff writer with The New Yorker magazine and MSNBC political contributor. Jelani, great to have you here. So at a time when this administration seems to be hell-bent on going after news organizations, critics, journalists, how do you see this Wall Street Journal development fitting into the bigger picture? Well, I mean, it's a winning strategy. It has been a winning strategy for them. You know, having, you know, filed a lawsuit against 60 Minutes or against 60 Minutes parent company and then resulting in a lucrative settlement there.

15:25There's the ABC, George Stephanopoulos situation. And in each instance, you know, these cases have been thought of in legal circles as fairly flimsy. But that's not the metric that you should be using to understand them, because politically They've been super inflammatory and they've also been aided by the fact that these parent companies had their own interests, you know, be they mergers or other kinds of concerns. I would also add when we saw The Washington Post back away from endorsing Kamala Harris. Also, the greater interests of Jeff Bezos, other enterprises factor into that as well. So the question is not so much whether or not this has legal merit, but are there other considerations, other dynamics that provide leverage against the Wall Street Journal as this gets adjudicated?

16:15There's one little detail in the story that caught my eye last night as the president was processing this report and reacting to it in real time online that he mentioned that he asked Rupert Murdoch to make this story go away. And we haven't really seen a lot of people dig into that. Of course, there's so much to this entire story that just keeps going that I can understand why reporters haven't spent a ton of time talking about that. But he basically said, I went after one of the corporate owners and specifically asked them to kill a story. And I'm curious what that little detail tells you about the moment that we're in.

16:51Well, I mean, when it talks about the coziness and chumminess of these relationships, not to mention that it completely obliterates any kind of executive branch respect for the First Amendment. You know, that's all kinds of red lines just stepping over there. And then finally, it's really telling that the story wasn't killed, but the story still found its way to print. And, you know, I'd be curious about what those conversations were like. Do you think in this moment, though, that reporters in newsrooms from The Washington Post to Wall Street Journal here, can we trust our corporate owners to have our backs?

17:28Well, I mean, what you're seeing. You're in this conversation as much as I am, but I will tell you straight up the conversations I have with people, people do not trust. very skeptical and very concerned about the extent to which their various parent companies will have their back, especially if they're doing controversial reporting, if they're doing something that involves government accountability, anything that could generate a scandal or potential legal investigation. People have real concerns about that. You're a journalist, but you're also a teacher of journalists, a mentor to other journalists.

18:01What are you telling the young people that you work with right now about how our field is going to survive all of this? And do you think we're going to make it through the next three and a half or so years? Well, I mean, I think that it's useful to have a gauge for history here. We have gone back a lot to the nature of the repression and antagonism that was directed at media and news organizations during the McCarthy era. That's been a very frequent, that's probably the closest analogy to what we see now. And, you know, I believe we will make it through the next three and a half years. My investment in journalism is contingent upon that faith.

18:40If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't be doing what I do. But I also think that it will be difficult. I think we shouldn't underestimate the dynamics that we're up against. Joseph McCarthy was a senator. We're now dealing with antagonism that comes directly from the White House. And as you see this, you know, a lot of people, they they ask us as reporters when we're out in the field a lot, like if it's hyperbolic to make comparisons to McCarthy, if we're going to be able to very clearly know the moment at which we are in that moment. Do you feel comfortable saying we absolutely are? And then what are your your warnings or your advice to those of us in the fight in the moment, if that is really what this is?

19:20Well, I will quote the historian Ellen Schrecker, who was one of the foremost authorities on McCarthyism in the United States. And she would agree with the idea that it is a hyperbolic comparison and that she thinks that the current situation is worse than what we were seeing in terms of incursions into First Amendment rights during the McCarthy era. So, yes, I think that we absolutely should make those kinds of comparisons. Thank you, Jelani. Great to be with you as always. Coming up, Will Sommer is here on the links between the Epstein conspiracy theories and QAnon and why this story is haunting Trump.

19:57Also, how Trump's new lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal is connected to his wider attacks on the free press, like his push to defund NPR and PBS, and new concerns that Stephen Colbert may have been canceled for his political takes.

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21:42And the idea that he's like, why are we still talking about that anyway, about the 2020 election? That was stolen, you know. All right. And we are back with Trump facing an uproar over Jeffrey Epstein. While his attorney general just filed a motion to unseal grand jury testimony. The problem for Trump, it's unclear what could ever satisfy his enraged followers. Experts pointing out MAGA's Epstein conspiracy theories run very deep and are linked to QAnon conspiracy theories about a deep state cabal. Fabrications that took hold on the far right, in part because Trump and his allies embraced them.

22:18Like Kash Patel, now Trump's FBI director. Here's what Patel said about QAnon before Trump's second term. A lot of people bring up Q and a lot of these other theories, and I'm like, look, there's a lot of good to a lot of it. And if it's Q or whatever movement that's getting that information out, I'm all for it. every day of the week with anything, Q or otherwise, is you can't ignore that group of people that has such a strong, dominant following. I talk with the president all the time as well, and we're just blown away at the amount of acumen some of these people have. And joining me now is Will Sommer, senior reporter for The Bulwark.

22:56He's also the author of Trust the Plan, The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy that Unhinged America. Thank you. Thank you for being here, Will. You're an expert on all of this. So bring me into the roots here, QAnon's roots and its connection to the kind of firestorm, fallout we've experienced these last two weeks. Sure. So at the heart of QAnon and sort of related conspiracy theories is the belief that there is a pedophile cabal that rules the world. And it's a lot of people in the Democratic Party and Hollywood and banking. and Donald Trump comes in because they think he's going to defeat the cabal and usher in a sort of utopian age.

23:37And Jeffrey Epstein's case, because there was a lot of legitimate stuff behind it and evidence, a lot of that was funneled into QAnon. And so it's really a huge pillar of QAnon. And so when the president or his team really fed into QAnon, they were getting people really excited about some sort of justice in the Epstein case. I'm curious, though, as you see parts of his base revolts. I mean, we've seen people call into right wing shows and say that they feel deceived and bamboozled in recent days to to an extent. Do you think that the president has overestimated the extent to which this movement has been just about him or owned entirely by him?

24:18I think he has. This is a strange situation because it's maybe the first time I can think of where Trump is this out of step with the base for this long. I mean, this is an issue. I mean, people, people called it an article of faith. I mean, for many people, it is a religious issue. They think they're working on behalf of God when they spread QAnon. I mean, they think, understandably, they're very emotionally affected by the stories of Jeffrey Epstein and his associates. And so this isn't like, you know, bombing Iran or raising tariffs or whatever, something that the base might disagree with on.

24:47I mean, this is really like a core part of a lot of these people's identities. And as you just touched on there, in a way, it's not a hoax at all, although the president has used that word a lot in recent days because someone's serving 20 years in prison in connection to all of this and the harm that he's caused to untold numbers of victims is very, very real. So I'm curious, as he now makes this effort to get the grand jury testimony here in the Southern District of New York unsealed, made public, seems to be an effort to placate some of his base. Do you think that is even going to work at this point?