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Trump Refiles $15 Billion Lawsuit Against The New York Times

NYT - Media · Michael M. Grynbaum · last updated

President Trump on Thursday refiled his defamation lawsuit against The New York Times and several of its reporters, again accusing the news organization of seeking to undermine his 2024 candidacy and disparage his reputation as a businessman.

Last month, Judge Steven D. Merryday, of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, threw out the president’s original 85-page complaint, saying it was unnecessarily discursive, laden with “florid and enervating” prose, and took too long to lodge formal allegations of defamation.

“A complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective,” Judge Merryday wrote at the time. He gave the president’s lawyers 28 days to refile an amended complaint.

Mr. Trump’s revised legal filing on Thursday evening was 40 pages long, less than half the length of the original. One of the defendants in the original suit, the Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt, is no longer cited as a defendant. Many of the original complaint’s lengthy tributes to Mr. Trump, like a sentence that described his 2024 election victory as “the greatest personal and political achievement in American history,” are no longer present.

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