A federal judge rightly rejected the Justice Department’s attempt to act as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer in a defamation case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll. Carroll says that Trump raped her decades ago, a claim that Trump denied by calling her a liar, prompting the defamation suit. Attorney General William Barr sought to intervene by claiming that Trump made those comments as part of his official duties, a claim which, if accepted, would mean Carroll’s suit would be dismissed.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan’s ruling allows Carroll’s lawsuit to move forward, though presumably Barr will appeal. But it’s really not a hard call. As Kaplan wrote in his decision, Trump’s “comments concerned an alleged sexual assault that took place several decades before he took office, and the allegations have no relationship to the official business of the United States.”
Carroll had sued Trump in state court, and after the state court ordered Trump to provide a DNA sample to be tested against the dress Carroll says she was wearing at the time, Barr jumped in to try to move the case to federal court with the Justice Department representing Trump, based on that claim that he said “she wasn’t my type” in his role as president.
This effort to take the Justice Department from an agency devoted to “fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans” to a department devoted solely to Trump’s personal legal matters comes at the same time as the department is taking action against a book about Melania Trump. The turn to authoritarianism is not subtle.