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President Donald Trump stated on Monday that he planned to sue the Des Moines Register over polling bias during the presidential election.
Trump shared the threat on Monday during a Mar-a-Lago press conference where he addressed his recent victory in a defamation settlement with ABC News.
“In my opinion, it was fraud and it was election interference,” he said, adding, “we’ll probably be filing a major lawsuit against them today or tomorrow.”
Trump was expected to lose Iowa, according to the poll. He won the state by 13 points.
Lark-Marie Anton, a spokesperson for the Des Moines Register, said in a statement to CBS News, “We have acknowledged that the Selzer/Des Moines Register pre-election poll did not reflect the ultimate margin of President Trump’s Election Day victory in Iowa by releasing the poll’s full demographics, crosstabs, weighted and unweighted data, as well as a technical explanation from pollster Ann Selzer.”
“We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe a lawsuit would be without merit,” Anton said.
As RSBN reported on Monday, ABC News host George Stephanopoulos deleted his X account after his network’s $15 settlement with Trump. The host’s claim that Trump was “found liable for rape” led to a lawsuit recently settled between the parties.
“According to the settlement, ABC News will pay $15 million as a charitable contribution to a ‘Presidential foundation and museum to be established by or for Plaintiff, as Presidents of the United States of America have established in the past.’ Additionally, the network will pay $1 million in Trump’s attorney fees,” Fox News reported.
“Stephanopoulos and ABC News also had to issue statements of “regret” as an editor’s note at the bottom of a March 10, 2024, online article, about comments made earlier this year that prompted Trump to file the defamation lawsuit,” it added.
The lawsuit, filed on March 19 in the U.S. District Court for Southern Florida, alleged that Stephanopoulos made the statements with malice and a reckless disregard for the truth. It claims the statements were widely shared with third parties and repeatedly circulated.