Trump’s many civil cases won’t stop just because he’s president. Here’s what to know
CNN
While Donald Trump is returning to the White House with sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution, that won’t necessarily keep him out of the courtroom or free from testimony under oath.
While Donald Trump is returning to the White House with sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution, that won’t necessarily keep him out of the courtroom or free from testimony under oath. Nearly a dozen civil suits at the trial-level in federal court have Trump as a defendant. The lawsuits – including a defamation case from the Central Park Five, eight lawsuits over Trump’s role in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol and two cases related to the clearing of racial justice protesters from the park outside the White House in June 2020 – are likely to hang over his presidency. And the president-elect’s own legendary litigious streak continues this week, with the newly filed lawsuit against the Des Moines Register and a pollster who predicted he would lose Iowa, which he didn’t. This adds to other pending lawsuits he’s filed against media outlets, and he has threatened more. If any of the lawsuits were to move forward toward trial, Trump could be forced to turn over private communications in the evidence-gathering phase or sit for videotaped depositions. Depositions, because they are under oath, always carry some legal exposure and could add to the political headaches for Trump in the coming years, as they have between his terms in the presidency. “I think when he is forced to sit and play by the rules, listen to questions, and answer them, he has difficulty doing that. When you’re the deponent, you’re not in control of the room,” Brigida Benitez, a lawyer who previously deposed Trump two weeks before his 2017 inauguration, said in an interview. She represented chef Jose Andres, who was sued by Trump after he pulled out of a restaurant deal in Trump’s former Washington, DC, hotel. What Trump said in that deposition is still private, and the case settled.
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Lawyers for the New York attorney general’s office are expected to appear in federal court in Albany on Thursday to try to disqualify a US attorney from investigating the state’s civil case against President Donald Trump.