Chris LaCivita, a top Trump campaign manager, has settled his libel lawsuit against The Daily Beast.
Mr. LaCivita, a political consultant who was the co-manager of President Trump’s 2024 campaign, had sued The Beast in March 2025 over a series of articles by the freelance journalist Michael Isikoff. Mr. Isikoff had reported that Mr. LaCivita’s consulting firm had been paid $22 million (a figure later corrected to $19.2 million) in two years by Mr. Trump’s campaign through a variety of contracts.
Mr. LaCivita said in his complaint, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, that The Beast’s “defamatory reporting created the false impression that Mr. LaCivita was personally profiting excessively from his work on the campaign and that he was prioritizing personal gain over the campaign’s success.” He argued that the reporting conflicted with Federal Election Commission records.
On Friday, the two parties reached an agreement to settle the suit. Under the agreement, Mr. LaCivita did not receive any payment or apology, according to The Daily Beast.
An editor’s note was added on Friday to the first article, originally published in October 2024, that stated that The Beast had “corrected and clarified its reporting concerning compensation associated with Mr. LaCivita’s work on President Trump’s campaign and removed a related podcast episode that could not be edited.”
“The parties have now mutually resolved their dispute,” the note added.
According to court filings, the parties paid their own legal costs.
Mr. LaCivita had asked for unspecified damages in his complaint, saying that the articles had caused a loss of income and business opportunities and that it would cost “millions of dollars” to repair his reputation. Mr. Isikoff was not named as a defendant in the lawsuit.
Before the lawsuit was filed, Mr. LaCivita’s lawyers had demanded a correction and retraction of the first October 2024 article. The Daily Beast added a correction at the time and removed a podcast episode titled “How Has Trump’s Campaign Manager Made $22 Million?”
In an email to Daily Beast staff members on Saturday, the executive editor, Hugh Dougherty, called the settlement “a very gratifying end to a legal battle that began last March.”
“We win, and keep, our readers’ trust by doing what we did here: reporting rigorously, transparently updating stories in the light of new reporting, and standing by our journalism when the people we have made uncomfortable threaten us, and try to bully and intimidate us,” Mr. Dougherty wrote in the note, which was viewed by The New York Times.
Mr. Dougherty also thanked Mr. Isikoff, saying his reporting “has now been vindicated.”
A lawyer for Mr. LaCivita, Mark Geragos, said in an email that the editor’s notes added to the articles amounted to “what some call the journalist equivalent of a white flag of surrender.”
“It was a complete and total capitulation by The Daily Beast,” he said.
Katie Robertson covers the media industry for The Times. Email: [email protected]
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