Trump wins big in ABC defamation settlement

ABC News will pay Donald Trump $15 million to settle a defamation case the president-elect filed against the media outlet after one of its star anchors made false statements about him. This past March, anchor George Stephanopoulos repeatedly stated on air that Trump was “found liable for rape” in the E. Jean Carroll civil case during an interview with Representative Nancy Mace. Stephanopoulos said, “judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape” when asking Mace, a sexual assault survivor, if she had misgivings about Trump’s alleged abuse of women. A jury in the E….

ABC News will pay Donald Trump $15 million to settle a defamation case the president-elect filed against the media outlet after one of its star anchors made false statements about him. This past March, anchor George Stephanopoulos repeatedly stated on air that Trump was “found liable for rape” in the E. Jean Carroll civil case during an interview with Representative Nancy Mace. Stephanopoulos said, “judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape” when asking Mace, a sexual assault survivor, if she had misgivings about Trump’s alleged abuse of women.

A jury in the E. Jean Carroll case explicitly rejected the woman’s claims that Trump had raped her, instead reaching the conclusion that he had sexually abused her. Some media figures have seized on the fact that the judge in the case claimed following the verdict that New York’s definition of rape (forced penetration with a penis) is narrower than what people “commonly understand” to be rape. Former veep spokeswoman Symone Sanders said as much on MSNBC, arguing that what Stephanopoulos said “seems to hold up [with] what the judge said after the fact.”

But the judge’s opinions about linguistics don’t change what was actually found under the law — and that’s where Stephanopoulos’s problem lies. ABC opted to fork over a significant sum of money and an apology because a motion to dismiss the case failed, the judge ordered the network to move forward with discovery, and Stephanopoulos was set to sit for a deposition — and the last two could be quite damaging for ABC News. The $15 million settlement will be given as a charitable donation to help build Trump’s future presidential library, and the network also committed to covering about $1 million for Trump’s legal fees. ABC also affixed an editor’s note to an online article about Stephanopoulos’s interview with Mace that says, “ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J. Trump made during an interview by George Stephanopoulos with Rep. Nancy Mace on ABC’s This Week on March 10, 2024.”

Some ABC defenders speculated that they settled early to avoid legal fees, but that theory was shot down by conservatives with legal expertise in this area. Kurt Schlichter, a columnist at Townhall who practiced defamation law, said, “ABC totally could’ve lost in court and it could’ve gotten hit for nine figures. Guaranteed? No. But possible? Yes, even probable.” Erick Erickson, who was legal representation for a newspaper and television station, guessed that ABC was trying to avoid deep discovery: “A $15 million settlement is not the cost of doing business. It is avoiding discovery.”

Regardless of ABC News’s motivations for settling, it is a huge win for the incoming president and will put the rest of the media on notice.

-Amber Duke

On our radar

GEORGIA COLLUSION? Former Fulton County special prosecutor Nathan Wade testified to Congress that he met with staff at the White House on several occasions while investigating former president Donald Trump for trying to overturn the results of an election, a newly released transcript suggests. Wade was interviewed by the House Judiciary Committee last week.

MAILING IT IN President-elect Donald Trump is reportedly considering privatizing the US Postal Service amid the agency’s financial losses and poor service record. Trump notably feuded with the agency during his first term and attempted to move key functions of the USPS to the Treasury Department in the hopes it would make the nation’s official mail carrier more efficient.

AI IN USA Japanese company SoftBank announced Monday a $100 billion investment in US projects over the next four years, with a goal of creating 100,000 jobs focused on Artificial Intelligence and emerging technologies. CEO Masayoshi Son appeared with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort to unveil the major financial announcement.

What we know about the mysterious drones

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s….we still don’t know.

Representatives from the FBI, DHS and the FAA briefed the press on background Saturday in an attempt to quell the public freakout over an uptick in drone sightings up and down the eastern seaboard. Their comments, similar to those made publicly by members of the administration, did little to clarify what it is people are seeing in the friendly skies.

An FBI official noted that they have established a tip line for sightings but that, of the 5,000 tips they’ve received, “less than 100 leads have been… deemed worthy of further investigative activity.” The officials guessed that most of the drones are being flown by private citizens. A DHS official claimed that most of the sightings are manned aircraft being mistaken for drones and asserted, “it’s important to understand that we don’t have any current evidence that there’s a threat to public safety.”

President-elect Donald Trump addressed the issue on Monday and his answers similarly stood out more for what they didn’t say than what they did.

Trump, who has pledged to declassify documents about UFOs, said that the “government know’s what is happening” and added that “our military knows where they took off from [and] they know where it came from and where it went.”

“I can’t imagine it’s the enemy,” the president-elect declared but conceded that “something strange is going on.”

These drones have been speculated to be everything from American military hardware to enemy technology to, of course, aliens. Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill, a former Navy helicopter pilot, floated her solution this week: start tracking them immediately.

“When this volume of unidentified aircraft conduct flights over civilian and military airspace, we need a swift, cohesive response and a streamlined, coherent line of communication to the public,” the Democratic congresswoman said, criticizing the current commander-in-chief’s lack of responsiveness. “We need action, we need speed, we need effectiveness. We have felt little of this to date.”

–Matthew Foldi

Deputy Harris campaign manager: we can’t win with sports fans

There are few better times than the year’s end to reflect on the mistakes you made and plan to improve for the future. Unless of course you played a key role in the Biden-Harris campaign — then you’ll be spending the final weeks of 2024 taking interviews in which you demonstrate how you remain in the first of the five stages of grief.

Hot on the heels of a Pod Save Americaappearance last month by campaign chiefs Jen O’Malley Dillon, Quentin Fulks, Stephanie Cutter and David Plouffe comes a chat between deputy Harris campaign manager Rob Flaherty and Semafor’s Max Tani. Flaherty, to his credit, does offer some specifics about the missteps of the Harris campaign media strategy. So why does he think the Democrats blew it? Not enough star power from the world of sports, apparently.

“As sports and culture became more publicly and sort of natively associated with this Trump-conservative set of values, it got more complicated for athletes to come out in favor of us,” he says.

And Flaherty does cop to the diminishing cultural power of the left. “The institutions by which Democrats have historically had the ability to influence culture are losing relevance,” he tells Tani. “There’s just no value… in a general election, to speaking to the New York Times or speaking to the Washington Post, because those [readers] are already with us.”

Flaherty also considers the missed opportunities of Harris not making more appearances on alternative media. “It’s not as simple as, like, ‘Go to Joe Rogan and talk about how great democracy is and the importance of preserving the independence of the DoJ,’ or whatever. You’ve got to speak their language,” he says. “And I think there are plenty of cultural touchpoints. I mean, Joe Rogan was at least recently, for Medicare for All. Theo Von is really against money in politics and the way that pharma has flooded our communities with opioids. Those are all things that Democrats have something to say on. But as long as we seem like the party of the system, the people who are anti-system and are looking for anti-systemic media — we’re gonna have a hard time connecting with them.”

As the Democrats work out how to rebuild after their chastening defeats, Flaherty outlines the need for liberals to make a dent in alternative media. The Democrats, of course, used to have their own Joe Rogan — he was called “Joe Rogan.” Do they think him and men like him are gone for good?

–Matt McDonald