Shocking. Offensive. Unprecedented.
Such language raced around the legal world on Tuesday and Wednesday after President Trump dispatched the U.S. Justice Department against E. Jean Carroll, who says he raped her some 25 years ago, and who is now suing him for defamation.
In other words, instead of paying his own personal lawyers, Trump wants to use taxpayer dollars to defend himself from a personal, civil lawsuit.
DoJ lawyers led by Trump’s front man, Attorney General Bill Barr, told a federal judge in a court filing on Tuesday that the defendant in Carroll’s suit should be the U.S. government, not the president personally.
Barr’s goal is to shift Carroll’s suit from New York state to the federal courts, where the president would likely be immune from defamation claims.
“It’s highly unusual for the DoJ to intervene in such cases,” reports Axios.
The department said in its filing that it intervened because Trump was “acting within the scope of his office as President of the United States” when he claimed last year that he doesn’t know Carroll and said she was “totally lying” about claims that he raped her in a New York department store in the mid-1990s.
That denial, and the claim that she was lying, triggered Carroll’s defamation suit.
“I can’t remotely conceive how DoJ can argue with a straight face that it is somehow within the official duties of the President to deny a claim that he committed sexual assault years before he took office,” said CNN legal analyst Elie Honig.
“More than a dozen women have accused Mr. Trump of sexual misconduct that they said took place before he was elected president,” observes the New York Times. He’s denied or ignored them all.
Carroll, who has a photo of herself and Trump together at a party years ago, wasted no time in launching a series of angry and defiant tweets, suggesting she represents “every woman who has ever been silenced!”
“Today’s actions demonstrate that Trump will do everything possible, including using the full powers of the federal government, to block discovery from going forward in my case before the upcoming election to try to prevent a jury from ever deciding which one of us is lying,” Carroll said in a follow-up statement.
The timing of the DoJ filing is significant, coming after a New York state court rejected Trump’s request to put Carroll’s lawsuit on hold. She asked that judge last month to order Trump to provide a DNA sample that could support her rape claim.
Now, with Election Day approaching, Trump and Barr want the entire thing transferred from state to federal court — and since federal officials are viewed as immune from defamation charges, that would effectively end Carroll’s suit.
“Throughout his tenure as president, Trump has faced persistent criticism for comments and other actions that legal observers see as bending the Justice Department to his political will,” notes the Washington Post.
In a statement emailed to Axios, the White House said that Carroll, a writer and former Elle magazine advice columnist, was just “trying to sell a book” by suing the president.
Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, said in a statement Tuesday night that the DoJ’s attempt to intervene in the case is a “shocking” attempt to use the resources of the federal government against a Trump adversary in a private legal matter.
“Trump’s effort to wield the power of the U.S. government to evade responsibility for his private misconduct is without precedent,” Kaplan said, “and shows even more starkly how far he is willing to go to prevent the truth from coming out.”