‘I’ve Never Heard of a Case Like This’: First Amendment Lawyer Floyd Abrams Knocks Trump’s ‘Strange’ Lawsuit

Legendary First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams does not think much of President-elect Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the Des Moines Register.

Trump sued the newspaper this week over a wayward pre-election poll conducted by pollster Ann Selzer. That survey showed Trump behind Vice President Kamala Harris by three points in Iowa, which he ultimately won by 13. The president-elect is also suing Selzer, her polling firm, and the paper’s parent company Gannett.

“[L]eft-wing pollsters have attempted to influence electoral outcomes through manipulated polls that have unacceptable error rates and are not grounded in widely accepted polling methodologies,” the lawsuit stated.

On Tuesday’s edition of The Lead on CNN, Jake Tapper asked Floyd Abrams, who is the father of Mediaite owner Dan Abrams, to weigh in.

“Floyd, what’s your response to Trump bringing this lawsuit against the Des Moines Register for a bad poll, an inaccurate poll, but one that he is alleging was fraudulent and constituted election interference?” he asked.

“I’ve never heard of a case like this,” Abrams responded. “This is really a strange claim. Trump had been favored to win in the state. This very respected pollster from years back came out with a poll saying he was really in trouble and was in fact behind. And he wound up winning by 12 percentage points. What’s the problem? I mean, it’s really, really striking. And on the face of it, it just has the smell of being just furious at her for just saying at some point, ‘You could lose this election.’ But there just doesn’t seem to be any legal basis for it… except that he wants to punish her because she never should’ve said he could lose.”

Trump has been on a litigious warpath against the media recently. He is also suing CBS over a 60 Minutes interview with the vice president in a case that legal experts have deemed “frivolous and dangerous.” The president-elect recently settled a defamation lawsuit with ABC, and the network agreed to apologize to Trump and give $15 million toward his presidential library after George Stephanopoulos claimed Trump had been found liable for “rape.” Last year in New York, Trump was found liable for sexual assault by a civil jury, which declined to find him liable for rape. The judge in the case, however, said there is not much of a distinction.

“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’ ” Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote at the time.

Watch above via CNN.