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Politics

Judge throws out Trump's lawsuit against Des Moines Register and pollster Ann Selzer

An Iowa judge dismissed Donald Trump's lawsuit against the Des Moines Register and pollster J. Ann Selzer with prejudice, ruling the disputed 2024 poll was protected political speech.

By Priya Raman · · 2 min read

An Iowa judge has dismissed President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the Des Moines Register newspaper and veteran pollster J. Ann Selzer, ruling that the disputed 2024 election poll at the heart of the case was protected political speech.

In a written ruling on Wednesday, Iowa District Judge Scott Beattie of the state’s Fifth Judicial District threw out the lawsuit, which had also named Selzer’s polling company and the Register’s parent company, Gannett. The case was dismissed with prejudice, meaning Trump cannot file the same claim again.

“At its core, the Plaintiffs’ Petition seeks to stretch both Iowa statutory and common law beyond their current bounds, turning speech that enjoys the highest category of First Amendment protection into a liability,” Beattie wrote.

The lawsuit centred on a poll published on 2 November 2024 that showed then-Democratic candidate Kamala Harris leading Trump by three percentage points in Iowa, a result that did not pan out on election day. Trump, who filed the suit in December 2024 alongside Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks and former Iowa State Senator Brad Zaun, alleged the poll was published to damage him and help Democrats, and claimed its coverage violated Iowa’s consumer fraud law.

Beattie rejected that argument, writing that the “Iowa Poll and its reporting are fully protected political speech” and that the consumer fraud statute applies only to consumer transactions.

A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team said the president plans to appeal to the Iowa Supreme Court, vowing to pursue “a just and winning conclusion,” according to CNN.

Selzer, who was represented by the free-speech group FIRE, said the ruling “reaffirms the fundamental freedom to pursue and publish the truth without political interference.” FIRE chief counsel Bob Corn-Revere called the lawsuit “laughable from the beginning.”

The ruling is a setback in Trump’s broader legal campaign against news outlets, which includes ongoing lawsuits against the BBC, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, CNN reported.

Sources

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