Trump goes on panicked lawsuit spree to hide bombshell Russia testimony

The explosive transcript from the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings released Tuesday by California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein is extremely damning for Donald Trump. It validates the Steele dossier alleging Trump was blackmailed by Russia, despite months of GOP attempts to discredit it and even to have its author prosecuted.

Trump’s reaction? He is going to sue everyone.

Bloomberg’s Jennifer Jacobs reports that Trump’s legal team has filed defamation suits against Fusion GPS and its founder Glenn Simpson for commissioning the dossier, as well as against BuzzFeed News for publishing it.

Completely unintimidated, BuzzFeed dared Trump to go for it in a public statement:

Our response to the reported defamation lawsuit by Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen: pic.twitter.com/ybSI8kWQvS

— Matt Mittenthal (@mattmittenthal) January 10, 2018

The entire premise of these lawsuits is ridiculous. It is not even established that the contents of the dossier are false — and as we discovered from the Senate transcript, much of it is supportable — let alone that it was spread in a malicious or defamatory way.

Further, the legal bar for a public official to claim defamation is prohibitively high, and the discovery process would only humiliate Trump.

At this point, Trump’s legal strategy appears to have no coherence whatsoever. His team also made a cease-and-desist threat to Michael Wolff’s publisher to stop the release of Wolff’s exposé on the Trump White House, which the publisher responded to by releasing it early.

In the business world, Trump used excessive lawsuits to punish any criticism of himself or his business empire.

But in the White House, it doesn’t work like that.

Trump needs to address the allegations head on — not try to silence the truth.