President Trump's legal team is demanding the Center for American Progress retract its attack on his National Guard deployments or face a $5 billion defamation lawsuit. The left-wing think tank has refused to back down.
The White House is demanding a retraction from a left-wing think tank that tried to deny President Trump credit for the historic drop in violent crime, threatening a $5 billion defamation lawsuit if the group refuses to back down.
Trump's personal attorney, Alejandro Brito, sent a nine-page letter to the Center for American Progress (CAP) on Monday demanding the organization retract a July 13 report claiming the president's National Guard deployments had no measurable effect on violent crime. The letter gave CAP until 5 p.m. Friday to retract the report, apologize, and compensate the president, or face what Brito described as an at least $5 billion lawsuit for the overwhelming financial and reputational harm caused by the false statements.
The think tank, led by former Biden administration adviser Neera Tanden, refused. In a Friday statement, Tanden declared the organization would neither cower nor bend in the face of legal action.
The CAP report is a textbook example of the radical left's playbook: take a historic law-and-order success and spin it into a smear. Violent crime and murder rates have plunged since President Trump returned to the White House, and his administration has credited the National Guard deployments to American cities as part of that turnaround.
The report instead claimed the decline was already underway before the deployments, arguing the president was exploiting pre-existing trends. It went further, branding the deployments a dangerous power grab and projecting the missions could cost taxpayers more than $1.7 billion if extended through the end of 2026.
Critics noted the irony: the same group demanding billions in federal spending on its own policy priorities is now attacking a program that has delivered measurable results for American families. The president's legal team called the report false, malicious, and defamatory, pointing to language that accused the president of knowingly deceiving the American people and manipulating crime statistics for political advantage.
CAP's general counsel, Kevin Metz, fired back with a letter of his own, calling the defamation allegation utterly absurd and insisting that truth is not and cannot be defamation. Metz argued the report's conclusions concerned crime statistics and the actions of the federal government, not President Trump personally.
Tanden doubled down, claiming the threatened lawsuit was a transparent attempt to silence the organization. She insisted the report was grounded in rigorous, evidence-based research, even as the administration pointed out that the group's own data cherry-picked trends to fit a predetermined narrative.
The clash highlights a broader pattern: left-wing institutions that spent years attacking the president now find themselves unable to accept that his policies are working. The National Guard deployments came in response to crime surges in Democrat-run cities, and the results have spoken for themselves even as liberal groups scramble to rewrite the story.
The Friday deadline has passed, and CAP has made clear it has no intention of retracting. That leaves the president's legal team free to proceed with what would be one of the largest defamation suits ever filed against a political organization.
Legal experts note that defamation cases against think tanks face high hurdles under First Amendment precedent, but the president's team appears ready to test those boundaries, particularly given the report's accusations of deliberate deception and abuse of military authority.
For now, the ball is in the courts. If the lawsuit moves forward, it will force CAP to defend its claims in discovery, potentially opening up its internal communications and research methods to scrutiny. Either way, the message from the White House is clear: smear the president's record, and there will be consequences.
President Trump's legal team is demanding the Center for American Progress retract its attack on his National Guard deployments or face a $5 billion defamation lawsuit. The left-wing think tank has refused to back down.
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