Donald Trump may have just won $15 million from ABC News and George Stephanopoulos, but Joe Scarborough believes the rest of the president-elect’s media lawsuits don’t stand much of a chance of succeeding.
The “Morning Joe” co-host laughed on Tuesday as he reviewed some of Trump’s pending media lawsuits, including his latest one filed against Iowa pollster Ann Selzer on Monday. Scarborough said Trump’s media targets “don’t have to worry” because his lawsuits are “all gonna get thrown out.”
“The Trump Team won’t get past summary judgement,” Scarborough said of the lawsuit against Selzer. “That’ll be thrown out very quickly.”
Scarborough is also skeptical of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against CBS and “60 Minutes,” whom Trump is suing over its editing of a Kamala Harris interview in October. Trump has ripped the program several times since then, including during his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, for how it edited Harris’ response to a question on the war in Gaza. Here is a look at Harris’ first response, followed by the version that was included on “60 Minutes”:
Original: “Well Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of, many things including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.”
Edited: “We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States, to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.”
On Tuesday, Scarborough laughed about that lawsuit, saying Trump was suing the program “for their edits and what they did in the edit bay — doing what ’60 Minutes’ has been doing for like 60 years.”
Scarborough’s chuckling on Tuesday came the morning after Trump added his lawsuit against pollster Ann Selzer, the Des Moines Register and its parent company Gannett to his list of media targets. Trump is suing for “brazen election interference” and fraud after Selzer said Harris was beating Trump 47-44 in Iowa the weekend before Election Day. Trump ended up winning the state by 13 points, and Selzer announced her retirement two weeks later.
The president-elect also has a lawsuit against Bob Woodward and another against the Pulitzer Board for rewarding the Washington Post for its reporting on him, among other pending legal battles.
Scarborough said he understood why ABC News settled with Trump, because “there was a case there.” Stephanopoulos had said multiple times on air that Trump was found “liable for rape,” when a civil jury found him to be liable for sexual abuse, which has a different legal definition in New York.
Overall, though, Scarborough said the media should not be too worried about Trump’s legal attacks.
“So you can make you can make the threats all you want to make the threats,” Scarborough said. “But at the end of the day, we still have a pretty, pretty strong First Amendment. And that ain’t going to change in the next six months.”
