"...a sitting president of the United States is threatening to sue for defamation."
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If you want to know how much money the city of Chicago spends on holiday parade security in a given year, you can file an open records request with the city for the details. If you want to know how a college president spends his or her time, you can ask for his or her official calendar through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). FOIA allows anyone to request information from the government. In my first six months at ProPublica Illinois, I’ve sent over 1,018 requests for information, to everyone from the Department of Transportation to the state lottery. As a data reporter, I need to understand what information government bodies across the state keep, how they keep those records and what they don’t retain in documents or databases. To do that, I need to know different state and local agencies, and maintain a list of contacts throughout the state.
Sandhya Kambhampati, ProPublica Illinois
On Thursday, Trump took the extraordinary step of having his personal lawyer, Charles Harder, threaten Wolff and his publisher with a lawsuit if they proceed with the release of the book. This followed publication on Wednesday of excerpts of the book in New York magazine and a cease-and-desist letter that Harder sent the same day to Steve Bannon, the former Trump campaign CEO and White House chief strategist who is a major source for the book. The letter warned Bannon that the president is prepared to file a lawsuit against him for defamation and for breaching a nondisclosure agreement he signed during the campaign. If the government couldn’t stop publication of the Pentagon Papers, the president certainly won’t be stopping the release of Michael Wolff’s explosive new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. But these letters to Bannon, Wolff and Wolff’s publisher mark an unprecedented moment in First Amendment history: a sitting president of the United States is threatening to sue for defamation and to seek a prior restraint—an injunction preventing publication—against a book of political reporting simply because he didn’t like what was written.
Teddy Kider, Politico
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