BURSTAttorneys for President Trump refiled a lawsuit against the Des Moines Register and Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer in state court Monday after moving to drop their complaint in federal court.
The complaint filed in Polk County is nearly identical to the one Trump attorneys first brought against Selzer and the newspaper in December, alleging they had violated Iowa’s consumer fraud laws by releasing a poll days before the November election that showed former Vice President Harris winning Iowa by 3 percentage points. Trump ended up carrying the Hawkeye State by 14 points.
Bob Corn-Revere, the chief counsel of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which is representing Selzer, called the move to state court “procedural gamemanship.”
“This maneuver was not in response to any settlement and is a transparent attempt to avoid federal court review of the president’s transparently frivolous claims,” Corn-Revere said in a statement.
The Monday move came a day before a new Iowa law was set to take effect to curb lawsuits intended to chill public speech by burdening respondents with legal fees, commonly known as a SLAPP suit.
Attorneys for Selzer, the Des Moines Register, and Gannett, the Iowa newspaper’s parent company, are now attempting to keep the suit in federal court.
“President Trump’s present Notice of Voluntary Removal would effectively escape the jurisdiction of the federal courts in time to restate his claims in Iowa’s state court without being subject to Iowa’s anti-SLAPP law,” they wrote in a motion to strike Trump’s dismissal in federal court.
Trump had sought several times to move the suit to state court. That was where the suit was initially filed, before attorneys for Gannett successfully moved it to have it heard in federal court instead.
Trump then attempted to have the case returned to a state venue, filing an amended complaint that added two Iowa plaintiffs, Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) and former Iowa state Sen. Brad Zaun (R). A judge denied the motion on May 23 and dismissed Zaun and Miller-Meeks as plaintiffs.
Trump’s lawyers first appealed that ruling on May 30. Then, on Monday, they voluntarily dismissed the federal suit altogether. The complaint filed in Iowa state court the same day includes Zaun and Miller-Meeks as plaintiffs.