A setback for Donald Trump in the case where the president tried to use the Department of Justice as his defense counsel. As we reported back in November, Trump dispatched the U.S. Justice Department against E. Jean Carroll, who says he raped her 25 years ago, and who is now suing him for defamation.
In other words, instead of paying his own personal lawyers, Trump wanted to use taxpayer dollars to defend himself from a personal, civil lawsuit.
Today, a judge with the Southern District of New York ruled Trump can’t substitute “the United States” in his place.
Carroll has described the Justice Department’s attempted intervention in her case as part of a pattern of the Justice Department acting as President Trump’s personal law firm.
“There is not a single person in the United States — not the president and not anyone else — whose job description includes slandering women they sexually assaulted,” Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, wrote earlier this month in a legal brief.