Trump Threatens Suit Over Report He Doesn’t Like, Aiming to Intimidate a Critic
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It was the latest example of President Trump’s bid to use the legal system against those who voice unflattering facts and opinions generally protected by the First Amendment.
A report by the Center for American Progress determined that there was “no evidence” that President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to cities across the country had affected the crime rate.
By Alan Feuer
Aug. 21, 2026
President Trump has opened a new front in his campaign to intimidate political foes, threatening a prominent liberal think tank with a $5 billion defamation lawsuit over a report concluding that his deployment of the National Guard to cities across the country has had little effect on reducing violent crime.
The threats against the think tank, the Center for American Progress, were Mr. Trump’s latest effort to use the legal system to punish critics for voicing unflattering facts and opinions generally protected by the First Amendment. And while it is unclear how far any suit the president might ultimately file will get in court, it could force the organization to spend money fighting it off and make it even more of a target of his allies and supporters.
On Monday, one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers, Alejandro Brito, wrote a letter to the center warning that he would file the suit if the group did not fully retract the report, which was published on its website on July 13. The letter, viewed by The New York Times, was addressed to the group’s president and chief executive, Neera Tanden, a longtime Democratic official who served as a senior adviser to President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and to several of its board members.
Mr. Brito claimed that the report about the National Guard was full of malicious and false statements. He gave Ms. Tanden and members of her board until 5 p.m. on Friday to retract it and apologize to Mr. Trump.
Ms. Tanden pushed back, saying in a statement that the center would “neither cower nor bend in the face” of legal action. She also defended the report, asserting that while its findings might have been “inconvenient to the Trump administration,” they were “grounded in rigorous, evidence-based research and analysis.”
“This threatened lawsuit’s attack on facts and evidence is baseless,” she added. “A fundamental protection of the First Amendment is to allow for the publication of facts and analysis that is contrary to the arguments and claims of any administration. A lawsuit is a transparent attempt to silence us.”
Mr. Trump has often lashed out at scholars and commentators for reproaching or critiquing him in the news media. And since winning re-election, he has filed a flurry of lawsuits against news organizations like the BBC and The Times, claiming they defamed him. He has even filed suit against the Des Moines Register, arguing that a poll the paper published before the 2024 election indicating that he would lose the vote in Iowa amounted to consumer fraud and election interference.
(The Times has filed its own suits against the administration, including two seeking increased access for its reporters at the Pentagon.)
The president has repeatedly claimed that his administration is the most transparent in American history. But he and his aides have used lawsuits and executive actions to go after law firms, universities and television networks. They have also used criminal tactics such as search warrants and grand jury subpoenas in an effort to pry loose sensitive information from reporters.
Many of these efforts have faltered once they reached court and faced judicial scrutiny. Mr. Brito himself has filed multiple failed suits on behalf of Mr. Trump. Last month, a federal judge in Florida referred Mr. Brito for potential disciplinary proceedings after ruling that a suit he filed for the president against the Internal Revenue Service amounted to an improper exercise in self-dealing.
The Center for American Progress report accused Mr. Trump of seeking to take credit for a nationwide decline in violent crime that began before he returned to the White House. The report determined that there was “no evidence” that the National Guard deployments had affected the crime rate, adding that they were poised to cost taxpayers more than $1.7 billion if they continued through the end of 2026.
The report asserted that the “primary goal” of the deployments was “never to stop crime.” Instead, it said they amounted to “a dangerous power grab by the Trump administration.”
The team that put the report together used an analysis based on homicide, violent crime and gun victimization data in cities where the National Guard was deployed — Washington, Los Angeles and Memphis — over the period from January 2023 to this February.
“This approach was employed to identify any statistical changes in crime trends associated with the deployment of the National Guard in specific cities,” its authors wrote.
Mr. Trump referred to the report on social media last week after watching a television segment about the report, which he described as “another Radical Left SCAM.” In the post, he threatened to sue the center and several of its funders, including the liberal financier George Soros, who has long served as a boogeyman for the administration.
A week later, Mr. Brito’s letter arrived at the center, saying that the president would sue if Ms. Tanden and her colleagues did not retract the report, issue an apology and give Mr. Trump unspecified financial compensation.
The letter ended: “PLEASE GOVERN YOURSELVES ACCORDINGLY.”
On Friday, a lawyer for the center fired back in a letter of his own, deriding Mr. Trump’s accusations that he had been defamed.
“This is utterly absurd,” the lawyer, Kevin H. Metz, wrote to Mr. Brito. “Truth is not and cannot be defamation.”
Mr. Metz went on to say that the center welcomed the opportunity to make its case in court and receive more information on the National Guard deployments through the process of discovery.
Other think tanks of various political stripes have rallied to the center’s side.
“Independent organizations across the ideological spectrum must be free to express their analysis and opinions, and to challenge those in power without fear of political retaliation or legal intimidation,” said Peter Goettler, the president and chief executive of the libertarian Cato Institute. “Disagreements on matters of policy should be settled through open inquiry, evidence, and debate — not threats designed to silence criticism.”
Alan Feuer is a reporter for The Times who covers the effects President Trump has had on the courts, the Justice Department and the broader rule of law.
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The U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago has spent the past year investigating a Democratic fund-raising firm once co-owned by the daughter of the judge in President Trump’s hush-money trial in New York, according to court filings and people familiar with the inquiry.
Last August, the U.S. attorney, Andrew S. Boutros of the Northern District of Illinois, directed Authentic Campaigns Inc. to turn over a broad range of internal communications with clients. They included former Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, and the Democratic National Committee, according to a grand jury subpoena reviewed by The New York Times.
Loren Merchan, the daughter of Juan Merchan, a supreme court judge in Manhattan, was the firm’s vice president until late 2024 and was also on the list. The Merchan family has been a frequent target of Mr. Trump and his allies, who have made unsubstantiated claims that the judge was out to get him and that his daughter profited from accusations aired at the trial.
The trial ended with Mr. Trump’s conviction in 2024, in the midst of his campaign for a second term, on 34 felony counts stemming from his efforts to keep a porn star from publicizing her story of a liaison with him.
The firm’s legal team, which included Preet Bharara, the former top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, sought to limit the request. Prosecutors eventually modified the subpoena, narrowing it to focus on a $468 payment from Ms. Harris’s presidential campaign, and emails between Ms. Merchan and her father, according to people with knowledge of the inquiry who requested anonymity to discuss an ongoing legal matter.
It is not clear where the investigation stands. No follow-up subpoenas have been issued to individuals, including Ms. Merchan, suggesting that prosecutors might not be actively working to charge anyone, those people added.
The inquiry is the latest indication of the extent to which U.S. attorneys’ offices across the country, once largely removed from political machinations in Washington, have increasingly been drawn into Mr. Trump’s effort to target his adversaries.
In this case, prosecutors sought the subpoena that came from a criminal referral from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee. The panel made the referral after Mike Nellis, the founder of Authentic Campaigns, refused to provide the committee with confidential emails it was seeking, including those between Ms. Merchan and her father.
“The Trump administration’s targeting of my company is an outrageous abuse of power,” Mr. Nellis said when asked about the investigation. “It is a ridiculous fishing expedition based on conspiracy theories that are completely divorced from reality.”
He accused the department of seeking to seize the “sensitive political communications of my clients who are among Trump’s most prominent political adversaries.”
A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the case specifically but said that congressional referrals can spur “law enforcement actions, such as actions involving court ordered activity.”
Judge Merchan and Loren Merchan did not respond to a request for comment.
The language in the subpoena is virtually identical to claims made by the House committee that Mr. Trump’s conviction in the hush-money trial presided over by Judge Merchan was “potentially politically motivated.” The criminal referral also included the contention that “Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s investigation and prosecution of President Donald J. Trump” might have been improper.
The subpoena did not specify what potential crimes might have been committed in the prosecution of Mr. Trump.
In addition to initially requesting information from the Harris and Biden presidential campaigns, Mr. Boutros sought material from Ms. Merchan, Mr. Bragg and one of his deputies, Matthew Colangelo; Mr. Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House; Ms. Hochul; Senator Adam Schiff, Democrat of California; Representative Daniel Goldman, Democrat of New York; Representative Lauren Underwood, Democrat of Illinois; and the Democratic Party’s House and Senate fund-raising arms as well as the Democratic National Committee.
The career prosecutors who secured the subpoena, Matthew Skiba and William Hogan, both played roles in an ill-fated case against six protesters accused of assaulting federal agents during the White House-directed immigration crackdown in 2025 known as Midway Blitz.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago had to withdraw the charges in that case after defense lawyers raised concerns about the conduct of Mr. Boutros’s prosecutors before a grand jury. That prompted Mr. Boutros, who worked as a prosecutor in the office he now runs, to announce a review of internal procedures.
Mr. Trump saw his hush-money trial in New York, which resulted in him becoming the first former president to be convicted on felony charges, as the culmination of a yearslong effort by Democrats to destroy him. He was fighting those charges at the same time that he was defending himself against two separate federal indictments and in an election interference case in Georgia.
Mr. Trump’s public pretrial attacks prompted Judge Merchan to impose a gag order to prevent him from intimidating jurors, prosecutors, witnesses and court staff. Mr. Trump’s lead defense lawyer, Todd Blanche, now the attorney general, argued to rescind the order but was unsuccessful.
By the time the trial started Judge Merchan himself emerged as a main target of the defense, with the president and his allies claiming that Ms. Merchan’s longtime involvement in Democratic politics was proof that the fix was in.
“Judge Juan Merchan is totally compromised, and should be removed from this TRUMP Non-Case immediately. His Daughter, Loren, is a Rabid Trump Hater, who has admitted to having conversations with her father about me, and yet he gagged me,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in March 2024.
The judge did not recuse himself. An ethics complaint filed by Trump allies had no effect on the trial. Judge Merchan discharged the case without any sentence or penalty after Mr. Trump was elected.
But Republicans, spurred on by Trump-allied influencers like Laura Loomer, have continued to make the case that the judge, his daughter and other operatives were guilty of wrongdoing.
The Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan of Ohio, subsequently began demanding documents from the firm. He cited a theory floated by Trump supporters: that Mr. Nellis and Ms. Merchan improperly used Mr. Trump’s prosecution in digital fund-raising pitches on behalf of Democrats. (Mr. Trump aggressively used the criminal indictments against him to raise millions during the campaign.)
“Experts have raised substantial concerns with Judge Merchan, your father, refusing to recuse himself from President Trump’s case despite your work on behalf of President Trump’s political adversaries and the financial benefit that your firm, Authentic Campaigns Inc., could receive from the prosecution and conviction,” Mr. Jordan wrote to Ms. Merchan in August 2024, requesting her correspondence with the judge.
Lawyers for the firm repeatedly argued that Ms. Merchan had no influence over her father’s work decisions and no contact with many of the campaigns the firm did business with.
They accused Mr. Jordan of engaging in a politically motivated “inquisition,” and claimed Ms. Merchan and Mr. Nellis had faced so many death threats from Trump supporters that they needed to hire security.
They refused to hand over most of the documents Mr. Jordan wanted most, calling the request “as baseless as it is dangerous” in a September 2024 letter to Mr. Jordan from Marc Elias, a prominent election lawyer who represented Mr. Nellis.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 16, 2026, Section A, Page 1 of the New York