Banishing a reporter: Trump escalates battle with Wall Street Journal over Epstein story

President Donald Trump on Monday followed up his lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal over last week’s Jeffrey Epstein story by banishing one of the newspaper’s reporters from Air Force One for an upcoming Scotland trip.

The moves reflect Trump’s aggressiveness toward media who displease him – even a media magnate, Rupert Murdoch, with outlets that have been friendly to him in the past.

Trump filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Journal and Murdoch on Friday because of the newspaper’s article about a sexually suggestive letter bearing Trump’s name that was included in a 2003 album compiled for alleged sex trafficker Epstein’s birthday. The president has denied having anything to do with it.

On Monday, the White House said it was removing a Journal reporter from the pool covering the president’s trip this weekend to his golf courses in Turnberry and Aberdeen in Scotland. The Journal’s Tarini Parti had been scheduled to cover him on the trip.

“Due to the Wall Street Journal’s fake and defamatory conduct, they will not be one of the thirteen outlets on board,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.

The Journal declined comment on the action.

It’s a tactic the Trump White House has used before. It restricted the access of journalists from The Associated Press to press events when the news outlet would not change its style guidelines to reflect Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. That launched a legal battle that is wending its way through the courts.

The defamation lawsuit is another tool Trump has used against media outlets. He has sued CBS News for its editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with former opponent Kamala Harris; ABC News for a false statement made by George Stephanopoulos in a story regarding a New York writer who had accused Trump of sexual abuse; and Meta after it removed Trump’s social media accounts following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

In each of those cases, Trump won multimillion-dollar settlements. But in those instances, news was only one part of a major corporation’s business. In the case of Murdoch and News Corp., news is the chief part of his business. The Journal has vowed to fight.

It’s also the first time Trump has sued for defamation as a sitting president, and it’s not clear whether any president has done that in the past.

“There’s nothing inherently wrong with a president bringing a libel suit,” said noted free speech attorney Floyd Abrams. “But this claim certainly seems like nothing more or less than an effort to suppress speech that our president finds discomforting. That’s not why we have libel law. It’s why we have a First Amendment.”

It’s all part of a broader pattern of trying to intimidate news organizations that report stories Trump does not like, said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

“These are lawsuits that have no hope of actually succeeding as lawsuits, but nevertheless have the potential to chill media organizations from doing what all of us need them to do,” Jaffer said.

Not every news organization has bowed down; “60 Minutes,” in fact, did some notably tough stories about the early days of Trump’s second administration. But it’s impossible to quantify stories that weren’t done because of fear of a fight with the White House, he said.

The Wall Street Journal leans conservative editorially, but hasn’t been afraid to take Trump on in both its opinion and news sections. Other Murdoch outlets – Fox News Channel and the New York Post – are much friendlier to him.

Ever since the administration announced that it would not be releasing additional government files from the case against Epstein, factions of Trump’s base supporters have turned on him. That has put some normally supportive news outlets in a difficult position.

Fox News largely avoided the story after Trump suggested his allies stop wasting time on it. But Fox’s Howard Kurtz reported on The Wall Street Journal lawsuit on his “Media Buzz” show Sunday, saying that by doing so, “the president has drawn extra attention to the Journal’s reporting.”

The president’s battle with the press has taken on several dimensions. He has been fighting to take away government support for news organizations like Voice of America, and last week the Republican-controlled Congress voted to take away federal funding from NPR and PBS because the president says their news programming is biased against conservatives.