Trump Renews Pledge to ‘Take a Strong Look’ at Libel Laws<br />President Trump on Wednesday repeated a pledge to make it easier for people to sue news organizations<br />and publishers for defamation, denouncing the country’s libel laws as a “sham” a day after his personal lawyer filed a lawsuit against a major media outlet, BuzzFeed News.<br />“We are going to take a strong look at our country’s libel laws, so<br />that when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts,” Mr. Trump said during a public portion of a cabinet meeting in the White House.<br />The president added, “Our current libel laws are a sham and a disgrace and do not represent American values or American fairness.”<br />First Amendment lawyers were quick to point out that Mr. Trump has little power to<br />modify those laws, barring a Supreme Court appeal or constitutional amendment.<br />On Tuesday, Mr. Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, filed a defamation lawsuit against BuzzFeed News for publishing, last January, a salacious and mostly unsubstantiated intelligence dossier<br />that purported to describe how Russia had aided the Trump campaign.<br />Harder of Harder Mirell & Abrams in Beverly Hills, Calif., sent an 11-page cease-and-desist<br />letter to the publisher of Mr. Wolff’s book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.”<br />Mr. Harder’s letter demanded that the publisher, Henry Holt<br />and Company, withdraw the book from stores and apologize; the publisher responded by moving up the book’s release date and increasing its first print run to one million copies, from 150,000.
