Trump Threatens $5bn Lawsuit Over Report Questioning National Guard Deployment
Donald Trump's personal lawyer has threatened a $5bn lawsuit against the Center for American Progress unless it retracts a report criticizing the effectiveness of the president's National Guard deployment. The think tank says it will not back down.
The Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal research organization, has received a letter from Donald Trump's personal lawyer, Alejandro Brito, threatening a $5bn lawsuit unless the center retracts a report on the National Guard's deployment.
The report, published on 13 July, concluded that deploying the National Guard in Washington DC, Memphis and Los Angeles had no measurable effect on crime despite costing an estimated $1.7bn. It compared crime declines in cities with and without a Guard presence and found no statistically significant difference, noting that violent crime had already been falling before Trump took office in 2025.
According to Brito's letter, the report leaves readers with the impression that the president knowingly deceived the public, manipulated crime statistics for political gain, and abused executive authority. The threatened suit would be filed on Trump's behalf personally, not by the federal government.
CAP president and CEO Neera Tanden said the organization stands by its research and called the legal threat an attempt to silence facts that are inconvenient to the administration, invoking First Amendment protections for publishing analysis that contradicts official claims. CAP has also rejected the defamation claim as baseless, arguing its statements concern crime data and government actions rather than Trump personally, and therefore cannot be defamatory toward him.
CAP was founded in 2003 and is led by John Podesta, former chief of staff in the Clinton White House who later chaired Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.
