By Kanishka Singh and Jack Queen
WASHINGTON, Sept 23 (Reuters) – An Iowa judge on Wednesday dismissed President Donald Trump’s lawsuit filed in late 2024 against the Des Moines Register newspaper and pollster J. Ann Selzer, saying a poll that showed the Republican leader trailing before the 2024 elections was legally protected speech.
Iowa District Judge Scott Beattie said Trump’s lawsuit sought to stretch the law to turn speech that enjoys the highest category of legal protection under the Constitution into fraud.
“Ratings, forecasts, and predictions that reflect a subjective weighing of objective data points are not sufficiently factual to be susceptible to proof, and predicting uncertain future events is not an exact science for which a publisher may be held to account,” Beattie said.
Beattie said the lawsuit was barred by the First Amendment of the Constitution, which guarantees free speech and free press rights. He also ruled that Trump’s lawsuit did not fit the state fraud statutes he sued under.
The ruling came as another judge appeared skeptical at a hearing that Trump’s decision to ban CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House was legal, indicating he may rule against Trump in his latest clash with the media.
Trump sued the Register, its parent company Gannett and Selzer over a poll ahead of the November 2024 election that showed Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris beating him in Iowa. He accused the newspaper and its longtime pollster of fraudulently misleading readers.
Free speech group FIRE, which represented Selzer, welcomed the ruling.
“We’re pleased that the court recognized what we’ve said all along: This lawsuit was laughable from the beginning and never should have been brought,” FIRE chief counsel Bob Corn-Revere said in a statement.
A spokesman for Trump’s personal legal team said he would appeal the ruling. He also said the Register and Gannett knowingly ran a “phony poll” in an “unlawful attempt to interfere in the 2024 presidential election and to defraud Americans into believing” Kamala Harris was winning the race.
Trump won the election, including in Iowa.
Trump’s pressure campaign against media coverage he dislikes has ramped up in his second term. He has repeatedly urged broadcasters to drop news programs he dislikes, called on the Federal Communications Commission to strip disfavored broadcast stations of their licenses, filed several lawsuits against media outlets and banned some media outlets from the White House.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington and Jack Queen in New York; editing by Donna Bryson, Chris Reese and Sonali Paul)
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