Legal expert Lisa Rubin responded to the breaking news that President Donald Trump has officially sued the Wall Street Journal and parent company News Corp., Rupert Murdoch, two reporters, and Dow Jones in the Southern District of Florida.
The Wall Street Journal published a report on a bawdy letter and drawing from two decades ago from Trump to Jeffrey Epstein as part of a 50th birthday album compiled by his girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell was convicted in 2021 for her role in a sex trafficking ring with Epstein, who killed himself in 2019.
According to Trump, publishing the report was libel. That means Trump must not only prove that the information published was false, but that it was also done so with "malice."
Speaking to MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace on Friday, Rubin said, "If you look at the reporting from the other night with a lawyer's eye, as I did, that piece of reporting was so particularly carefully worded as if a legal department had scoured every last punctuation mark and word in it. This is not something that the Wall Street Journal took on lightly."
She noted that another key piece of the reporting is that the Wall Street Journal alleged that the Department of Justice had the documents it referenced as part of the information included in the Epstein investigation.
Wallace asked what a suit like that would look like if it were allowed to move forward. Rubin painted a picture of witnesses giving testimony that could confirm all of the claims in the report.
"But in all likelihood, and this is again my belief, not based on any reporting, the Wall Street Journal already likely has evidence in its possession that this document is real and or was received by the Department of Justice as part of its 2019 investigation into Jeffrey Epstein," said Rubin. "Whether or not that document then resurfaced as part of the recent review that Sen. [Dick] Durbin (D-IL) talked about in his letters today to Attorney General Bondi and others is unclear."
She said that if she were running the defense for the Journal and the document were in the possession of the DOJ, "I'm going to rely on that as the Wall Street Journal, because truth is always a defense in a defamation action."
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