President Donald Trump’s lawyers gave a very Trump-like excuse for refusing to accept $15 million to settle his $20 billion lawsuit against CBS.
The MAGA president’s lawyers claimed that the “mental anguish and confusion” he suffered from a “deceptively edited” 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris was just too much to bear in a Wednesday filing, The Wrap reported.
The interview was conducted in Oct. 2024, leading up to the 2024 presidential election in November.
“Defendants’ conduct, including news distortion, constituted commercial speech which cannot by any reasonable interpretation be found to have constituted editorial judgment, and that speech damaged Plaintiffs,” Trump’s lawyers argued.
Instead, Trump’s lawyers want CBS’ parent company Paramount Global to cough up more than $25 million, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“The fact that such commercial speech was issued by a news organization does not insulate Defendants from liability under the First Amendment,” the lawyers wrote.
Trump is a co-plaintiff in the lawsuit with Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson, his one-time White House physician, who claims he was also “injured” by CBS’ conduct because he “is a consumer of broadcast and digital news media content.”
Paramount ripped the lawsuit as an “an affront to the First Amendment” that is “without basis in law or fact” in a March motion to dismiss. But the company now appears to be looking to put the conflict behind it as it attempts to push through an $8 billion merger with Skydance Media that must go through federal review under the FCC.
CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon announced that she was leaving her post earlier this month after reportedly refusing to offer an apology to Trump as part of a settlement, WSJ reported.
Paramount execs are also fretting over how such a potential settlement can expose them to future shareholder litigation and criminal charges for bribing a public official, a sources told the WSJ.
Meanwhile other media companies and law firms have capitulated to Trump’s demands in a bid to avoid being targeted by Trump’s DOJ led by MAGA loyalist Pam Bondi.
Meta agreed to pay $25 million to settle a 2021 lawsuit from Trump in January after the social media platform suspended his accounts following the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riots. X paid $10 million to settle a similar suit the following month. Disney has also shilled out $15 million to Trump’s presidential foundation and paid $1 million in legal fees to protect anchor George Stephanopoulos from further legal action from the president.
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