‘Breathtaking assault’: Lawyers hit back at Trump’s ‘laughable’ fight against pollster

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, is out with a brief in President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against Iowa-based pollster Ann Selzer, urging the court to dismiss the case as an attack on constitutional rights.FIRE has previously attacked this case as a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or SLAPP, arguing that it has zero merit and is meant to chill negative coverage of Trump in the press.The lawsuit is based on the fact that Selzer’s Des Moines polling firm published a survey just before the election showing former Vice President Kamala Harris leading Trump in Iowa — which would have been a massive upset as Iowa has not been regarded as a top-tier presidentially competitive state since as far back as 2012. Ultimately, the poll missed by 16 points, as Trump carried Iowa by comparable margins to his previous two elections, prompting Selzer to announce her retirement from the polling business. ALSO READ: ‘Alarming’: Small colleges bullied into silence as Trump poses ‘existential threat’Trump, however, was unsatisfied simply taking a victory lap defying an outlier poll, and filed a lawsuit against Selzer, accusing her firm of deliberately manufacturing the numbers to sabotage his campaign, employing the novel legal theory that this amounted to “consumer fraud” against voters — a lawsuit so bizarre even the conservative pundit whose criticism of Selzer may have inspired Trump condemned him over the stunt.In a news release on Tuesday, FIRE proclaimed that “the argument that the widely respected polling expert engaged in ‘consumer fraud’ is laughable and demonstrates how Trump and his attorneys never had any good-faith basis on which to bring this case in the first place.”“This frivolous effort is motivated solely by a president’s desire to punish perceived political opponents and to intimidate would-be critics into silence — a breathtaking assault on the First Amendment and the underpinnings of a free society,” stated FIRE chief counsel Robert Corn-Revere. “Once you get past the groundless assertions, campaign-style hyperbole, and overheated conspiracy theories, there is nothing left.”The suit against Selzer marks a number of controversial legal cases filed by Trump widely considered by experts to be frivolous; another was his suit against CBS News’ “60 Minutes” for supposedly editing Harris’ presidential interview to harm his campaign.

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