Legal experts representing different ends of the political spectrum say the recent lawsuit by President-elect Donald Trump against the Des Moines Register is based on a strained interpretation of Iowa law and is unlikely to find success in court.
Trump filed suit Dec. 16 against the Register, its parent company Gannett and longtime Iowa pollster Ann Selzer, alleging violations of the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act. The complaint centers on a poll published by the Register in early November that understated Trump’s support, showing Vice President Kamala Harris with a 3-point lead over Trump in Iowa just days before Trump went on to win the state by 13 points.
Trump’s suit alleges the poll was fraudulent and an attempt at election interference. The Register has said it stands by its work.
Several experts who have reviewed Trump’s petition say his legal theory is a stretch. Samantha Barbas, a professor and First Amendment expert with the University of Iowa College of Law, said Iowa’s consumer fraud law is a poor fit for Trump’s complaint.
The Iowa Consumer Fraud Act “is meant to protect people who buy goods or services, not people who consume news and other sorts of information,” Barbas said. “So this is completely far-fetched, in my opinion, and other than Trump’s lawsuit here, and he has a similar case going on in Texas, I’m not aware of parties that have used a consumer fraud statute to punish or sue newspapers for information they don’t like.”…
Eugene Volokh, a UCLA professor and fellow with the free market-oriented Hoover Institution, wrote Dec. 18 for the libertarian-leaning publication Reason that “the First Amendment generally bars states from imposing liability for misleading or even outright false political speech, including in commercially distributed newspapers — and especially for predictive and evaluative judgments of the sort inherent in estimating public sentiment about a candidate.”
Volokh cited a 2020 case from Washington state courts, where a group sued Fox News alleging that its statements by its show hosts, including Sean Hannity, dismissing or minimizing the COVID-19 pandemic violated that state’s consumer protection laws. Both the district judge and appellate courts in Washington rejected that claim, finding that statements of opinion on a topic of public concern are core First Amendment-protected speech.“There are some historically recognized exceptions to First Amendment protection for knowing falsehoods, such as for defamation, fraud, and perjury. But those are deliberately exceptions,” Volokh wrote. “Defamation is limited to knowing (or sometimes negligent) falsehoods that damage a particular person’s reputation. Fraud is limited to statements that themselves request money or other tangibly valuable items. Perjury is limited to lies under oath in governmental proceedings. There is no general government power to punish political falsehoods outside these narrow exceptions.”…