Trump’s lawsuit barred by the First Amendment, pollster’s team argues

Lawyers for J. Ann Selzer, a veteran Iowa pollster, have issued a scathing response to President Donald Trump’s lawsuit over a poll that showed him trailing Kamala Harris in Iowa days before the 2024 election, arguing that her polls are a form of political speech protected by the First Amendment.

In a Friday filing, lawyers for Selzer, the Des Moines Register newspaper and its parent company, Gannett, asked the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa Central Division to dismiss the claims and requested oral arguments on the motion.

The poll caused a national stir when it showed Harris leading Trump in Iowa, a red state, by three percentage points and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points. Trump ended up winning Iowa by about 13 points.

Selzer, the Des Moines Register’s primary pollster for four decades, announced after the 2024 election that she would be stepping away from election polling, and she has written that she analyzed the poll findings after the election and found nothing in the data to “illuminate the miss.”

Trump’s attorneys filed their lawsuit in December — after he had won the 2024 presidential election — alleging that Selzer’s poll amounted to “election interference” and arguing that the newspaper and pollster “hoped that the … [poll] would create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris” in the last week of the campaign. The suit says those actions violate the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act.

Selzer’s lawyers, however, say Trump misunderstands the legal concept of “fraud,” and the poll, the defendants stated in Friday’s filing, is political speech entitled to special protection under the First Amendment.

“In the United States there is no such thing as a claim for ‘fraudulent news.’ No court in any jurisdiction has ever held such a cause of action might be valid, and few plaintiffs have ever attempted to bring such outlandish claims. Those who have were promptly dismissed,” the filing states.

The defendants also argue that the plaintiffs’ “allegations about polls and news stories they dislike have nothing to do with fraud.”

“‘Fraud’ does not exist when someone believes dishonest behavior took place and they lost money. If it did, courthouses would overflow on Monday mornings with claims against National Football League referees,” Friday’s filing states. “ … America’s history and tradition protects political commentary; it does not subject ‘false’ reports to liability.”

Selzer’s legal team called the claims “a transparent attempt to punish news coverage and analysis of a political campaign, speech that not only is presumptively protected but ‘occupies the highest rung of the hierarchy of First Amendment values, and is entitled to special protection.’”

They also argued that the plaintiffs in the case “can no more sue a newspaper pollster for diverted resources than a farmer could sue a TV weatherman for crop damage due to unexpected frost.”

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, known as FIRE, is providing legal representation for Selzer’s defense. “Throughout American history, thanks to the First Amendment, no court has ever accepted claims like these. This case should be no different,” Robert Corn-Revere, FIRE’s chief counsel, said in a statement.

Attorneys for Trump didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment. The lawsuit over the Selzer poll is one of several legal disputes Trump has engaged with news outlets in recent months.

The lawsuit over the Iowa poll was filed days after ABC News settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Trump, agreeing to pay $15 million. The lawsuit stemmed from a televised interview in which anchor George Stephanopoulos said Trump was found “liable for rape” when a jury had found him liable for sexual abuse in the case of E. Jean Carroll, who accused Trump of raping her in a department store in the mid-1990s.

In 2023, the jury awarded Carroll $5 million for battery and defamation. In January 2024, Carroll was awarded an additional $83.3 million in damages for defamatory statements Trump made that disparaged her and denied her rape allegations.

CBS is facing an ongoing lawsuit brought by Trump over a “60 Minutes” interview with Harris. Trump’s lawyers argue the interview’s edit of the sit-down amounted to election interference. The network has called the lawsuit baseless. The Federal Communications Commission — which is now being led by Brendan Carr, a Republican who has praised Trump as a leader in combating media bias — is also reviewing the interview.

In November, Trump’s campaign filed a Federal Election Commission complaint against The Washington Post, alleging that the newspaper company made illegal in-kind contributions to Harris’s campaign. That complaint refers to a story in Semafor that reported, without citing a source, that The Post purchased advertising to amplify stories critical of Trump. A Post spokesperson at the time dismissed the allegations as “without merit.”

On Friday, The Associated Press sued three Trump administration officials, seeking to regain access for its journalists, who have been barred from attending White House events since Feb. 11 over a decision to continue using the name Gulf of Mexico, rather than Gulf of America.

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• Elahe Izadi, Laura Wagner, Meryl Kornfield, Jeremy Barr and Annabelle Timsit contributed.