President-elect Donald Trump has a habit of suing his critics.Matt Bishop/imageSPACE via ZUMA Press Wire
Last week, Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Kevin Kiley (R-Calif) introduced federal anti-SLAPP legislation, in a bid to protect journalists, whistleblowers, and individual internet users from those who use lawsuits as an intimidation tactic.
SLAPP suits—formally, Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation—are designed to prevent people from exercising their free speech. A common example is a person suing a media outlet after unfavorable coverage—attempting to bankrupt journalists from lawyers’ fees, even if, in the end, the outlet wins the case. Such suits are already illegal in 34 states. But, on the federal level, there’s no such legislation.
Raskin and Kiley’s bill, the “Free Speech Protection Act,” would allow people being sued over speech acts to file a special motion to dismiss by classifying a lawsuit as a SLAPP. The party who filed the SLAPP suit would then be required to pay the respondent’s legal fees.
There is a rush to implement the bill before the next presidency. Trump and his companies have sued a broad range of media companies for defamation, ranging from the New York Times to a local Wisconsin local TV station. Most recently, Trump filed a lawsuit against CBS over the editing of Kamala Harris’ “60 Minutes” interview, asserting that the interview’s presentation was “consumer fraud.” (CBS is moving to get that lawsuit thrown out before Trump assumes the presidency.)
Nominees for Trump administration posts are following in the boss’s footsteps. Days after his nomination for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth was accused of sexual assault. Now, he’s saying he’ll sue his accuser for extortion if he is not confirmed for the post. Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, threatened to sue a former White House colleague for “defamatory statements,” after she asserted that he had a habit of lying.
“I do think those threats are a good example of why it’s so important to have statutory protections like this federal bill,” ACLU litigator Vera Eidelman told me. “We shouldn’t have to be worried about having to defend against lawsuits, spending the time, the money, the stress to do that, just because we want to say something about a matter of public concern.”
Raskin introduced similar legislation in 2022, but it did not pass. Since then, however, more state-level anti-SLAPP bills have been signed into law. Advocates believe this time around they have a better chance.
The coalition pushing the bipartisan bill includes organizations that often stand in opposition to one another: corporate accountability organizations are listed next to the Institute for Free Speech, which is well-known for promoting unlimited corporate spending in politics. David Keating, of the Institute for Free Speech, said that’s because “ they all know somebody or some organization that’s had to deal with these kind of frivolous lawsuits trying to shut people down.”
On the state level, anti-SLAPP laws often pass near-unanimously. And, Keating said, about 60 percent of the US population is now covered by such a law. But people bringing these suits, he added, often do so in federal court. “Because a lot of the speech is on the internet they can try to claim that this is not a dispute between two people that are in the same state,” he said.
After the PRESS act—a shield law for journalists—was blocked in the Senate by Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on December 10th, Raskin’s bill is one of the few options left to protect journalists against lawsuits from people much more powerful and moneyed than they are as Trump resumes power.
“There’s that old saying, you can sue a ham sandwich, right?” Keating said. “I mean, that’s kind of the way it is in federal court, anybody can bring a lawsuit, no matter how stupid.”
