Donald Trump suffered a legal defeat on Tuesday as the U.S. government reversed its earlier position that the former president could be immune from the writer E. Jean Carroll’s $10 million defamation lawsuit against him.
In a letter to Trump’s and Carroll’s lawyers, the U.S. Department of Justice said it no longer believed Trump acted within the scope of his office and employment as president in June 2019, when he denied having raped Carroll in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the mid-1990s.
The department late in Trump’s presidency had reached an opposite conclusion, which the Biden administration adopted to the surprise of some observers.
Its change of heart means it will not try to substitute itself as the defendant, effectively ending Carroll’s case because the government cannot be sued for defamation.
“Evidence of Mr. Trump’s state of mind, some of which has come to light only after the department last made a certification decision, does not establish that he made the statements at issue with a ‘more than insignificant’ purpose to serve the United States government,” the department said.
Steven Cheung, a spokesperson of Trump, said the step showed that the Justice Department under President Joe Biden was “politically weaponizing the justice system” against Trump. He dismissed the department’s move as “a partisan sham.”
Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan said the change removes a possible impediment to the scheduled Jan. 15, 2024 trial in Manhattan federal court.
“We have always believed that Donald Trump made his defamatory statements about our client in June 2019 out of personal animus, ill will and spite, and not as president,” Kaplan said.
