Trump threatens defamation suit against left-leaning think tank
President Trump's legal team is threatening to sue left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress for defamation over a report it issued in July that found "no evidence that National Guard deployments have reduced violent crime."
In an Aug. 17 letter, Mr. Trump's lawyer, Alejandro Brito, claimed the report contains materially false statements intended to damage the president. He set a deadline of 5 p.m. Friday for the organization to retract the report, apologize and compensate the president. Failure to comply, Brito wrote, could result in a lawsuit seeking at least $5 billion in damages.
Kevin Metz, an attorney for the Center for American Progress, responded in a letter: "This is utterly absurd: truth is not and cannot be defamation. … The right to disagree with the government, debate policies, and express dissent over policy choices is central to a functioning American democracy."
Both letters were obtained by CBS News. CBS News has reached out to Brito for comment.
"This threatened lawsuit's attack on facts and evidence is baseless," CAP President and CEO Neera Tanden said in a statement. "A fundamental protection of the First Amendment is to allow for the publication of facts and analysis that are contrary to the arguments and claims of any administration. A lawsuit is a transparent attempt to silence us. We will neither cower nor bend in the face of it."
The Trump administration first deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles in June 2025 with a mission to protect federal immigration officials and other federal law enforcement amid heated protests over immigration raids.
Two months later, Mr. Trump announced Guard troops would also deploy to Washington, D.C., "to rescue our nation's capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse." Deployments to Memphis and New Orleans followed.
The report that drew the president's ire relied on multiple analyses of citywide crime data in those communities and concluded that the National Guard deployments "had no measurable effect on violent crime, homicides, or gun victimizations."
Overall, the FBI reported last week that violent crime rates were down nationwide in 2025.
If Mr. Trump pursues a lawsuit over CAP's report, he's "going to have a difficult hill to climb because of the legal standard that is used by public figures in defamation cases," said CBS News legal contributor Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
"The official has to show that the defendant made the statement at issue with actual malice, which means they knew the statement was false, or they acted in reckless disregard of its falsity," Levinson explained.
"It's very unlikely that a dispute about statistics would give rise to a defamation claim."
In addition, she said, the president "would have to show that the statements of issue are reasonably understood as being about him, as opposed to statements ... generally criticizing his administration."
Mr. Trump has a history of using lawsuits to target institutions and individuals he perceives as political opponents.
Tanden, in her statement, said, "In America, profound disagreements over public policy are resolved through robust public debate, not through threats or intimidation. Independent data, evidence, and analysis are essential to that debate. Efforts to silence independent research because its findings are unwelcome by an administration or president should alarm every American."
