Free press advocates voiced alarm Tuesday over what one commentator called the "chilling effect" of a lawsuit filed by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump against a prominent pollster, her firm, and an Iowa newspaper that published a preelection poll showing Vice Kamala Harris leading the Republican nominee in the state which he ultimately won by double digits.
Trump sued pollster J. Ann Selzer, her polling firm Selzer & Company, The Des Moines Register, and the paper's parent company, Gannett, alleging fraud and "brazen election interference" over a November 2 poll showing Harris, the Democratic nominee, ahead of Trump by 3 points. Trump won Iowa by 13 points.
"I'm doing this because I feel I have an obligation to," Trump explained after filing the suit on Monday. "I'm going to be bringing one against the people in Iowa, their newspaper, which had a very, very good pollster who got me right all the time, and then just before the election, she said I was going to lose by 3 or 4 points."
Trump's lawyers say the disparity between Selzer's polling and the election's actual outcome shows the defendants acted with "intentional" malice and engaged in "election-interfering fiction."
Unlike other Trump lawsuits including the one ABC Newsagreed Saturday to settle for $15 million plus $1 million in legal fees, the new suit does not accuse the defendants of defaming the president-elect. Instead, it alleges violations of the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act and related provisions.
Responding to the filing, a spokesperson for Gannett—which owns over 100 daily and 1,000 weekly newspapers in the United States and abroad—said that "we stand by our reporting on the matter and believe this lawsuit is without merit."
Media and legal experts said that although the new lawsuit has very little chance of success, Trump—who has called the press the "enemy of the people" and has even suggested that he would not mind if journalists were shot—is aiming to silence critical media through resource-sapping lawfare.
"The odds of success here are slim to none, but winning in court is not likely the real goal of this lawsuit," Clay Calvert, a media law expert and professor at the University of Florida's Levin College of Law, toldNBC News. "The true motivation is to intimidate the press and journalists. I unfortunately suspect this lawsuit is just a harbinger of things to come."
Fox News commentator Howard Kurtz said on social media that while it is "very hard for a public figure to win" a lawsuit like the one Trump filed, "the chilling effect is clear."
Joel Simon, director of the City University of New York's Journalism Protection Initiative, toldCNN that he "would not have imagined" that such tactics "would be deployed in the United States."
"I would also be concerned about the arbitrary, petty, and vindictive nature of these legal actions that President-elect Trump is pursuing," he said. "The possibility of legal victory is slim because under the 'actual malice' standard reporting done in good faith is protected in the U.S. But for a smaller or less-resourced news organization, mounting a legal defense can be a serious challenge."
