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Trump sues Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch and two reporters for Epstein letter story



Donald Trump is seeking $10 billion in damages in a lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal, its parent company, owner and two reporters claiming libel and slander for publishing an article saying the future president wrote a lewd letter to Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday.

Trump filed the lawsuit in Miami federal court on July 18 and named as the plaintiffs Dow Jones & Company, News Corporation, owner Rupert Murdoch and reporters Khadeeja Safdar and Joseph Palazzolo.

At issue is a story published July 17 describing a letter from Trump that the Journal wrote was part of a leather-bound birthday book with dozens of other letters that was presented to Epstein in 2003. Trump's letter ends with “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret,” according to the Journal.


Again this comes as "The Epstein List" is of interest due to various lawsuits surrounding Epstein estate. Also this puts the Murdochs in an odd situations and how the 1st Amendment is handled in this lawsuit when it involves the President.
 
My bet is that they will settle. With a donation going to the president's library.

Will the president continue to do regular interviews with Fox now that he's suing the parent company.
 
My bet is that they will settle. With a donation going to the president's library.

Will the president continue to do regular interviews with Fox now that he's suing the parent company.

It's who knows where this is going given that Trump's Truth Social has a deal with Newsmax to have their on demand content go through Newsmax.
 
Why wasn't Lachlan Murdoch or Robert Thomson named in the lawsuit?
True then again I thought the Murdochs would never be sued by the Trump White House. I was thinking of the lines of Trump suing media outlets that are not Right Wing nominally like Apnews, PBS, CPB, Paramount, and NPR most notably.


 
Why wasn't Lachlan Murdoch or Robert Thomson named in the lawsuit?
I have not read the filing, but frequently lawsuits add in "John Doe and Richard Roe" language to cover names that may be added in discovery.
 

Here is a roundup on the state of Press Freedom as of 2025 in the Trump era.
 
White House faces backlash after booting The Wall Street Journal from Scotland media coverage plans Woah and this takes place as the Wall Street Journal lawsuit is taking place. Now Wall Street Journal is banned from the White House Press Corp. The last time we heard of news outlet being banned from the press Corp is when Trump banned AP and Reuters from the White House press Corp.


New York Times comes to Wall Street Journal’s defense in wake of Trump lawsuit Now New York Times defends Wall Street Jornal in the press Corp. "This attempt by the White House to punish a media outlet whose coverage it does not like is deeply troubling, and it defies the First Amendment," Weijia Jiang, the president of the White House Correspondents' Association, said in a statement.White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday that The Wall Street Journal would not be part of the group of media outlets set to travel with Trump when he visits Scotland on July 25-29. The move comes after the Journal reported that Trump in 2003 sent Jeffrey Epstein a birthday card with a drawing of a naked woman, calling Epstein a “pal” and signing off, “may every day be another wonderful secret.”"Due to the Wall Street Journal’s fake and defamatory conduct, they will not be one of the thirteen outlets on board," Leavitt said in a statement, though she did not explicitly refer to the Journal's Epstein article.
 

The White House has just banned the Wall Street Journal from the White House Press Pool.
IMHO this whole Epstein issue is a result of certain GOP politicians making up the existence of a list for political gains about the Biden Justice Department was covering up to protect "someone" high up in the Democratic party. One of 2 things could be the most likely:

#1 There is no list to release and they look like fools and where lying.

#2 There is / are big name Republican(s) on the list. The Biden Justice department did not think they had a slam dunk case so they sat on it, not to be accused of being partisanship.
 
When I first saw the story in the OP, I wondered if the Journal would be intimidated, or if the owner would tell then to back off the story. Instead, they came out with another scoop:


Good for them. This is what independent journalism is all about.
 
IMHO this whole Epstein issue is a result of certain GOP politicians making up the existence of a list for political gains about the Biden Justice Department was covering up to protect "someone" high up in the Democratic party. One of 2 things could be the most likely:

IMO the segment of the population who really care about Epstein believe he is just the tip of the iceberg and releasing the list will allow the states and counties to arrest and prosecute hundreds, if not thousands, more individuals who participated in his sex trafficking network. This view was reinforced by the 2023 film "The Sound of Freedom" starring Jim Caveziel, which was promoted by various conservative media figures including radio hosts Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro, and Donald Trump himself, who hosted a celebrity screening at one of his golf resorts.

The claim that the government has no client list seems flimsy. They may not have a client list maintained by Mr. Epstein in real time, but surely FBI agents collected a few names over the course of 8 or 10 years investigating this enterprise.
 
IMO the segment of the population who really care about Epstein believe he is just the tip of the iceberg and releasing the list will allow the states and counties to arrest and prosecute hundreds, if not thousands, more individuals who participated in his sex trafficking network. This view was reinforced by the 2023 film "The Sound of Freedom" starring Jim Caveziel, which was promoted by various conservative media figures including radio hosts Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro, and Donald Trump himself, who hosted a celebrity screening at one of his golf resorts.

The claim that the government has no client list seems flimsy. They may not have a client list maintained by Mr. Epstein in real time, but surely FBI agents collected a few names over the course of 8 or 10 years investigating this enterprise.
True and also in an unrelated case that has some similarities to this one, there are people who accused Diddy of having a similar list clients but convicted him for a fraction of the charges.

 
#1, There probably is no CLIENT list, per se. Yes, Epstein had clients, but so what, he had a cover business. What there probably was was a BUDDIES list, or a Rolodex, or a Palm Pilot, whatever you call it. The people he palled around with and pulled (and those he wasn't successful in pulling) into his venal world. All the players in this sordid drama -- Bondi, Patel, Bongino, Kirk, Alex Jones, etc. -- kept intentionally referring to the CLIENT list so they could later disavow its existence, and still be narrowly, technically accurate. (As in, plausible deniability, not perjuring themselves.)

#2, The strategy is now failing. The base doesn't care what they call the list, they want to see who Epstein's fellow travelers were in the exploitation of underage teen girls. (And would anyone here really be surprised if it later comes out that some of those exploited kids were boys, to accommodate those of Epstein's, uh, associates who preferred to play on the other team?)

#3, His Majesty is thrashing, flailing, throwing anything he can think of against the wall to change the subject. He's been an idiot savant at this strategy in the past, and he's nothing if not predictable. He keeps repeating the same playbook over and over, but it's just not working this time. Sue his co-conspirator Rupert? Sure, try it. (He'd never let it go as far as discovery, and everyone here knows why.) Blame Obama for Russiagate? Yeah, try that, get Tulsi in here to weave a ridiculous conclusion around already-known facts. Claim that MS-13 is in cahoots with The Borg to flood Trump's golf courses with illegal immigrants? Oops, did I give away the plot of tomorrow's episode?

This, IMO, is a sick man trying desperate to find some path out of a swamp of his own making, and leaving a big mess of spaghetti on the wall.
 
#1, There probably is no CLIENT list, per se. Yes, Epstein had clients, but so what, he had a cover business. What there probably was was a BUDDIES list, or a Rolodex, or a Palm Pilot, whatever you call it. The people he palled around with and pulled (and those he wasn't successful in pulling) into his venal world. All the players in this sordid drama -- Bondi, Patel, Bongino, Kirk, Alex Jones, etc. -- kept intentionally referring to the CLIENT list so they could later disavow its existence, and still be narrowly, technically accurate. (As in, plausible deniability, not perjuring themselves.)

#2, The strategy is now failing. The base doesn't care what they call the list, they want to see who Epstein's fellow travelers were in the exploitation of underage teen girls. (And would anyone here really be surprised if it later comes out that some of those exploited kids were boys, to accommodate those of Epstein's, uh, associates who preferred to play on the other team?)

#3, His Majesty is thrashing, flailing, throwing anything he can think of against the wall to change the subject. He's been an idiot savant at this strategy in the past, and he's nothing if not predictable. He keeps repeating the same playbook over and over, but it's just not working this time. Sue his co-conspirator Rupert? Sure, try it. (He'd never let it go as far as discovery, and everyone here knows why.) Blame Obama for Russiagate? Yeah, try that, get Tulsi in here to weave a ridiculous conclusion around already-known facts. Claim that MS-13 is in cahoots with The Borg to flood Trump's golf courses with illegal immigrants? Oops, did I give away the plot of tomorrow's episode?

This, IMO, is a sick man trying desperate to find some path out of a swamp of his own making, and leaving a big mess of spaghetti on the wall.
True and also some of this is that we are coming out of the Diddy verdicts where similar things did happen. If one is wondering why the Epstein List keeps popping up and some of it is partially traced to Musk citing the existence of that list and how that affects Ghislane Maxwell’s ongoing legal issues.



Umm however if the Epstein files are out there they were partially released via the lawsuits on Ghislaine Maxwell or it’s being compared to how Diddy was convicted on similar charges that had their origins from a then civil lawsuit by Lil Rod where his legal team got law enforcement to investigate Diddy to the point we are now with Diddy convicted of the very things that Wall Street Journal was investigating on Epstein and Trump.


 

Here are more details on the Trump lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal via the legal team ordering the Murdochs to testify.

"Murdoch is 94 years old, has suffered from multiple health issues throughout his life, is believed to have suffered recent significant health scares, and is presumed to live in New York, New York," the filing states. "Taken together, these factors weigh heavily in determining that Murdoch would be unavailable for in-person testimony at trial."


"The way it's being framed is almost sarcastic," says Joseph Azam, a former senior vice president and legal executive for Murdoch's newspaper and publishing empire. "It's classic Trump. He is using lawfare, to use his own term, to silence people.


"The problem is he's going after people who are equally equipped — and in some ways, I would say, better equipped — to navigate this stuff," Azam tells NPR. The unusual demand to seek an urgent deposition of Rupert Murdoch — and only Rupert Murdoch — feels like "a gratuitous attempt to poke the bear," Azam says.
 
When I first saw the story in the OP, I wondered if the Journal would be intimidated, or if the owner would tell then to back off the story. Instead, they came out with another scoop:


Good for them. This is what independent journalism is all about.

My younger brother told me (and I believe I heard it elsewhere too) that Rupert Murdock soured on Donald Trump just before the 2024 election. If accurate, we could be seeing a major courtfight ahead over the Wall Street coverage of the Epstein issue.
 
My younger brother told me (and I believe I heard it elsewhere too) that Rupert Murdock soured on Donald Trump just before the 2024 election. If accurate, we could be seeing a major courtfight ahead over the Wall Street coverage of the Epstein issue.
You're right Trump has a history of occasionally going after Fox News when they air stuff that the GOP or Putin does not want to hear. Sometimes I have to wonder which "Fox News" he is going after because there are two entities within Fox that identifying themselves as being from "Fox News" is it the wing that contains right wing content like Fox Nation or is it the "Live Now on Fox" one the wing that contains segments from the local Fox O&O's around the country and Live Now cites AP whenever theres an approval poll. The Live Now on Fox one has sometimes aired segments that don't go along with Trump. Yes we know that the Murdochs has to get other demos to their media brands besides Trump Supporters. The Murdochs know that if they are too dependent on Trump then their own media brands will end up lower in stock value.




https://thehill.com/homenews/media/5427426-trump-fox-news-the-five-jessica-tarlov/


President Donald Trump has threatened to send National Guard troops to major cities to combat what he claims are areas plagued by crime.
Trump has distorted facts about crime in Washington, D.C. when his administration took over the D.C. police department on Aug. 11 and flooded the city with federal agents and National Guard troops. Now, Trump is hinting at taking similar action in Chicago, New York, Seattle, Baltimore, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon.

But data shows that most violent crime in these locales and other cities nationwide has dropped in recent years. According to the Associated Press, homicides through the first six months of 2025 were noticeably down compared to the same time last year.
 


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